Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld spoke toGerald Jaidee, CEO of Medvarsity Online Ltd., Hyderabad to know about the need for continued medical education and the existing options and opportunities.Medical Education Trends
Globally, Medical Education has evolved quite a bit, if you want to look at the significant value North America has for example US specifically with regards to Medical Education, for about 17000 under graduate seats and 24000 post graduate seats; that means every doctor who graduates with an under-graduate degree has enough seats available to at least to do 2 levels of post- graduation before he or she becomes a practicing clinician.
So the quality of healthcare goes significantly high. Through a robust mechanism of tracking and measuring continuing medical education, they also ensure that the medical fraternity is continuously investing and growing their own skills to keep in tuned with what is happening in the ecosystem around them. It not only extends to the doctors and the clinicians/physicians but also to the nursing ecosystem.
Medical Education challenges in India
The two contexts in the Indian scenario: One is the role of Medical education in getting to India where it is. Soon after independence one of the big disease conditions that India was dealing with was Polio. We all grew up with the phrase ‘Do boond zindagi ki’. Everybody from a Rajesh Khanna to Sachin Tendulkar to Irfan Khan and whoever else have spoken about ‘Do boond zindagi ki’ in theaters, schools etc.
There were specific campaigns that were happening. But when the whole pulse polio program started, the WHO had said that, few of the countries will never achieve eradication of polio as a disease, where India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and parts of sub Saharan Africa.
However, as of 2014 India has been officially declared as Polio free whereas Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of sub Saharan Africa continued to have Polio as a disease condition. While a large portion of this change happened due to increased efficacy of drugs, improved healthcare service and a significant part of this change happened due to better education.
Another example of education playing role in impacting macro economic situation is population control. In the 60s, India and China had the highest population growth rate globally.
China brought in punitive measures through policy to reduce the population growth in the nation. India brought the idea of Educating about family planning as a method to impact population growth. So if you look at macro economic healthcare index which measures how healthy a nation is, India has made some fantastic progress of leveraging education. From a less that 20-25 medical colleges in the 60s, today we are sitting at about close to 450 medical colleges across India today.
India produces the largest number of doctors and the largest number of engineers in the world, thanks to investment that the government and subsequent governments have made in focusing on education. Having said that, where we are slowing down right now, I use the US example of 17000 undergraduate seats and 24000 post graduate seats, India is completely at the flipped condition.
We have seen 65,000 under-graduates seats but we have only 27000 post graduate seats, which means that 70% of practicing doctors out there treating people outside of tertiary care centers are just plain MBBS graduates, and globally an MBBS graduate is not allowed to practice medicine unless they pick up a specialization even at the basic level in family medicine or general practice and that is the opportunity India is sitting on right now.
Need for quality in Medical Education
Lets take the case of 3 primary killers in India: India has been declared as the diabetes capital of the world, has the highest number of deaths due to trauma and accidents and India is also the cardiac capital of the world.
All 3 of them are neither the disease conditions that you are born with nor they are communicable but those are the things that can be impacted by lifestyle choices and preventive healthcare management methodology rather than curative healthcare. There lies an opportunity for India to start looking at how to manage healthcare and how to get better clinicians to come in and help drive this behaviour.
In case of trauma, one of the critical role a doctor plays in not preventing it but saving a person is through the emergency department across the hospitals, its only in 2009 that MCI recognized emergency medicine as a specialization.
Its only in 2012 that the first doctor graduated in emergency medicine certification behind them. That means this huge disease condition today has less than 300 qualified doctors treating the 1.3 billion potential Indian who will meet a road accidents, a poisoning, an asthma/respiratory or a cardiac attack etc. So there is a huge gab there.
Medvarsity Online Ltd. : Introduction and journey so far
Medvarsity is an outcome of a vision that our Chairman Dr. Pratap Reddy had more than 18 years ago and this was to drive the need of improved healthcare across India and with a dearth of qualified healthcare professionals. The opportunity was to train them and upskill them to impact healthcare better.
We have partnered with almost 60+ hospitals across the country, we work with some of the leading healthcare providers such as Apollo, Max Healthcare, Columbia Asia and SUT hospitals which is the part of BR Life group etc.
We also started leveraging technology much more effectively, we realized that a large portion of young doctors who want to learn have grown up with technology in their hands and are intuitively spending time on YouTube and other channels to compliment their clinical education.
We became a completely tech-led education entity and brought in a lot of innovation into the space by leveraging artificial intelligence, virtual reality and live virtual classes to make sure learning is as immersive as the young doctors of today are used to in their lives.
We also expanded and reached out to a lot of education institutions outside the country to accredit and partner on our programs so that the young doctor when he/she graduates with a Medvarsity course not only gets a credibility of Medvarsity, the credibility of the clinical institution where he/she has been deployed for his clinical attachment, but also the credibility of the partner organization which therefore, makes that strength of that certificate that he gets much more higher.
It also builds the confidence in a recruiting hospital when he/she looks at their doctors with the Medvarsity certificate, there is certain amount of comfort and assurance that this person has understood and gone through a learning process.
Medvarsity Online Ltd. future plans
Our vision is very singular. Most organizations have a vision and a mission statement, we are one combined statement. Our focus is to ‘Impact healthcare though education’. On one side we have been focusing on for the past 18 years is the professional education side of it, which is largely the doctor, the nurse or a professional working in a healthcare setting.
The second component of the healthcare impact is provided by the hospitals or the service providers. So now we are moving in to managed learning service as a solution to help hospitals become better training institutions. NABH and JCI certification mandate each hospital to be a teaching entity as much as a service entity to qualify for and meeting the JCI or NABH standards, so we are impacting that.
The third part of where our growth focus is on patient education. The more informed I’m about my disease condition, the better I’m able to manage it.
Today, unfortunately most hospitals, doctors deal with ‘google patients’, as the doctor prescribes something then patient goes back and searches on Google and tries to second guess what the doctor is saying, which means the doctor is no longer owning the journey of that patient’s success and the patient is also doubting the doctor and therefore verifying through a non credible source.
So what we are trying to build is a tool which will provide the credibility that patient requires to understand when doctor says, you are going through a myocardial infarction and I’m going to recommend an open heart surgery.
Now the patient can go to a credible source, which we call it as ‘Arka’ (Arka is the beam of light in Sanskrit) and research everything about myocardial infraction as in what does it mean to have an open heart surgery or look at surgery videos, testimonials of patients who have been through this surgery, objective testimonials by different doctors from across the industry who are talking about what is the recovery cycle of an open heart surgery patient etc. All of this content is available in 25+ languages across the country so now the patient can absorb this in his or her language.
We have also integrated patient care modules which is both for the patient and the care giver, so if somebody is going to manage medication, they will know, when to give it, what to give it. Its linked to the HRMS (HR management system) to give that.
So that’s like if I go back to our vision of impacting healthcare through education and if we can do it for doctors, healthcare service providers and patients, then I think our story is complete.