If you entered a hospital in India, in the year 2030 what would you see? Would you see an OPD with patients milling around, standing in line for the doctor to see them? Will he then be sent from department to department depending on what tests and diagnostics need to be done? Will there be wards with patients admitted, undergoing treatment and watched over by an army of nurses and paraclinical staff?

What happened to the promise of personalised healthcare? What about Remote Patient Monitoring? or Population Health? Did these live up to the promises?

To understand the healthcare of the future, we need to find out what we are doing today to build the future healthcare of tomorrow. Last month I was at the Smart Tech Healthcare Summit, where I caught up with my good friend and Healthcare Leader Dr Ashwin Naik. Ashwin and I first met at the Philips Digital Health Conclave in 2015 where he first talked about the hospital of tomorrow.

According to him the hospital of tomorrow, may not have wards, or departments for that matter. It will only have an ICU, Emergency, and wards for palliative care.  We continued that thought process when we met this time and I personally wanted to see if he has changed his opinion since 2015.

To my surprise, Ashwin still stands by his earlier opinion and he gave me further reasons to believe that the hospital of tomorrow would be more of a monitoring center, more like a NOC. While patients would be monitored from their house, speeding up recovery and returning the patient to full functionality. Below is a recording of this conversation.

As always I would love to have your opinion on this topic. Please do let me know how do you envisage the healthcare of tomorrow?