Piyush Gupta began his career at Ceasefire Industries Ltd as Key Account Manager. He joined Kestone in 2005 as a fresher in the operations team and moved quickly to manage key clients for Kestone. From there on in 2007, moved to Delhi to manage the branch and then to heading the business team. When Career Launcher acquired Kestone in 2008, he became part of the management committee which was also responsible to run the organization. In 2012, Piyush took over the role of President and was given the responsibility of running the organization. The role continues, just that the scope now has expanded as Kestone has become a global organization.
From tackling the challenges of the initial days of the pandemic till the introduction of Covid-19 vaccine, this one year has been the year for the pharma & healthcare industry. New challenges like medical emergencies, restrictions of physical movement, access to life-saving drugs etc. prompted these industries to think differently, and they were on their toes to adopt innovative technologies with virtualization being one of them. Use of digital technologies and virtual experiential platforms were widely adopted for remote consultation. This first-level medical attention successfully addressed a lot of emergencies and eventually, it opened a new world of patient care. Though a large part of the population preferred face to face interaction during a consultation or buying prescription drugs from the chemist shops, digital healthcare and its advantages were soon realized. Use of user-friendly technologies and mechanisms helped these industries to reach out to the not so savvy users who felt that digital medical care is too complicated for them or just beyond their reach.
The healthcare sector saw a rising demand for virtual consultation from families who had elderly patients and this has become an ongoing practice since. The vulnerability of the elder group in terms of Covid-19 infection prompted the healthcare industry to set-up virtual consultation for immediate attention. The experiential virtual platforms also acted as a great leveller for the sector as it helped with the preliminary diagnosis and real-time assessment of emergencies.
The pharma sector along with medicine e-commerce portals adopted technological innovations to create virtual dispensaries and medical stores where people could access medicine catalogues and match prescriptions to order the right medicine, without physically going to the chemists. This resulted in efficient crisis management by facilitating the contact-less buying of life-saving drugs.
The onset of the new year has already brought a lot of good news for the industry and the introduction of the new Covid-19 vaccine is just the beginning. This has already promised a bright future for the industry players who have already adopted the innovation. Virtual experiential platforms acted as a great leveller by enabling the healthcare and pharma industry to deliberate on the adoption of future-oriented best practices. These platforms have helped the pharma & healthcare industry to device pro-active policies which can transform the way people used to consume healthcare services. A lot of international medical conferences were organized by global healthcare organizations, completely on virtual event platforms. These conferences brought together leading practitioners and policymakers on various virtual platforms with a rich agenda to create some really meaningful conversations.
Leading speciality hospitals have shown their keen interest in virtual event platforms as they got a first-hand experience of how technology can help them create roadmaps for specialities like paediatrics, neurology, cardiology etc.
This transformation has given a new direction to telehealthcare. It’s been around for quite some time, but with virtual platforms coming to the scene, it opened new doors of opportunities for the sector. The sector can now easily facilitate dissemination of health-related information in a more interactive way and can better engage with patients. Remote patient care is a major part of telehealthcare. Through virtual mediums, the telehealthcare players can now make a medical intervention and monitoring more effective for long-distance patients. It will also address the issue of travel restrictions and access to remote areas. The adoption of virtual platforms will eventually democratize healthcare making quality healthcare accessible to people from every income group.
Futuristic and flexible features remain the main reasons these virtual platforms are gaining popularity. Medical conferences at first started with web conferring software, but they soon realized the limitations. Virtual event platforms successfully helped the industry players to migrate these conferences digitally by keeping the fluidity to connect with medical professionals from around the globe intact. Personalization, real-time networking and more engaging knowledge sharing are some other features that proved to be relevant and effective.
As far as future opportunities are concerned the scope of innovation is limitless. Widespread integration of AI & ML capabilities in virtual platforms is not a distant dream anymore. It is just a matter of months when healthcare and pharma industry will be able to engage with patients and consumers in a more holistic way. Since these industries are human resource intensive, virtual platforms will also make collaboration and coordination seamless, two pre-requisites for flawless patient care. Virtual Reward and Recognition is another key area which the sector will actively focus on. The pharma & healthcare industry operates with a workforce who are the frontline warriors in this battle to eradicate Covid-19. Virtual mediums can be a tool to boost their morale by organizing innovative employee programs.
Apart from virtual events, the future holds a lot of promises in terms of creating virtual realism to modernize their patient relations services. It is particularly useful for old people who can’t travel easily and are vulnerable to the virus. A lot of hospitals are already creating realistic virtual clinics where one can get a preliminary check-up done and consult a doctor in real-time and the benefits are better than physical clinics.
Both these industries are actively innovating in the virtual space and virtual event is one of the key areas where they are focusing. The virtual event platforms are one the other hands are showing a lot of promises in terms of possibilities as over the last one year it’s been proved that virtual healthcare is the new realm for the pharma and healthcare industry.