NCG_KCDO - Digital Health Industry Consultation

Cancer care is changing rapidly worldwide, and use of digital tools and technologies are playing a key role in driving this change – improving quality, access, and cost of care. Digital technologies are being used across the entire patient journey – screening, diagnostics, treatment, hospital care, home care and survivorship. It is imperative for India to have a strong focus on Digital Health to improve cancer care – make it more consistent, evidence based, accessible and affordable.

NCG is embarking on a very important mission of helping its 300 NCG member hospitals in the country leverage digital health tools and technologies. These NCG affiliated hospitals includes both public and private hospitals and offer cancer care to more than 65% cancer patients of the country. NCG has recently set up the Koita Centre for Digital Oncology (KCDO) – www.kcdo.in - to help the NCG affiliated hospitals adopt digital health tools, drive collaboration, and create digital transformation roadmaps, with the objective of improving the quality, affordability, accessibility, and outcomes of cancer care to patients.

KCDO will enable NCG and NCG hospitals pilot and adopt new technologies - including AI/ML, big data, automation, cloud, mobile - which benefit hospitals, doctors, patients, and consumers. Embracing digital tools like tele-medicine and remote patient monitoring make care more accessible especially in semi-urban and rural areas. AI-assisted clinical decision support tools help improve doctors’ ability to provide better care, and mobile patient engagement apps help patients with medication management and better compliance to care guidelines. Similarly, use of healthcare data analytics across hospitals enables tracking and benchmarking of clinical outcomes and effectiveness of different treatment and care pathways. KCDO will support NCG in driving common digital initiatives across NCG hospitals including EMR adoption, healthcare data interoperability, reporting, and analytics.

Towards this objective, we are organizing an Industry Consultation to share NCG’s digital health vision, and get a viewpoint from healthcare technology vendors on the NCG vision and seek their feedback and guidance. We shall also share an outline of the upcoming NCG-EMR initiative – which includes defining NCG EMR Requirements (NER) for cancer care and EMR partner empanelment. EMRs will strong cancer care workflows will ensure better patient outcomes and value-based healthcare for people suffering from cancer.