Hello all! Happy March. For a special surprise, I will once again be talking about behavioral economic-related strategies around the world. Today, I will be talking about the fight for making public health more available in India via digitalization. I hope you all enjoy.
India’s game-changing steps in 2024 to digitalize healthcare stem from the “Ayushman Digital” initiative. The app is supposed to provide healthcare in the country’s less-than-great public health sector with a galvanization of new resources aquired. And that, it seems, is also a longshot of a strategy that is intended to go far and spread to regions that don’t really have a lot of other options for achieving anything like decent public health systems.
In just its first year, “Ayushman Digital” reached more than 100 million users nationwide, yet clearly had a profound effect beyond just those whose lives it touched directly. In the former Indian regions that bore the brunt of limited access to healthcare, for instance, the program improved not just the occurrence of the rural populations showing up for consultations and appointments, but also the taking of medications prescribed by doctors. This impressive outcome was possible mostly because the program furnished those it texted with “personalized health nudges,” and it could seek to do so by rooting its operations in artificial intelligence.
“Ayushman Digital” was unlike anything seen before. It yielded unparalleled results. Medication compliance across the regions experimenting with the new tools and approaches increased by 30%—a wild improvement given the potential consequences of poor patient compliance. Similarly, “Ayushman Digital” ensured that preventive health screenings ascended by half again as much—by 25 percent—a standard essential for diagnosing at-risk patients for chronic conditions like cancer and diabetes.
In rural places, where healthcare is often hard to come by and getting to facilities can be a problem, the mobile platform has made a big difference. With it, patients can make appointments, have virtual consultations with doctors, and receive health advice—all without having to go anywhere. And that’s the real revolution. All of this is, of course, incredibly convenient for anyone who uses the system. But it’s a system that’s particularly advantageous for the connection of old men on roof vent smoke breaks and rural women waiting for the bus.
“Ayushman Digital” owes its success to the principles of behavioral economics, especially the nudging and finely personalized methods of inducing people to change their behavior. How? you might ask, well, these personalized methods, like the many I have talked about in the past, serve as a way of truly individualizing the movement to those who need it the most. As a result of these personalized nudges, users are able to make actionable plans easier as it is more clearly in front of them, which in turn causes a sense of anchoring on to one another’s ideologies to spread the usage of this platform.
A primary tactic of “Ayushman Digital” revolved around personalizing health content to fit individual situations. This meant that patients with a disease like diabetes would not only receive reminders to take their medication—a technology all too prevalent in DM we can all agree—but also reminders to do the very thing that keeps most people with DM and a number of other conditions out of the hospital. That, friends, is what we call “personalization.”
“Digital Ayushman” is a remarkable success. It shows what can be achieved with digital platforms when they are applied to healthcare. It provides a model. And it is not just any model. When a venture like “Digital Ayushman” succeeds, it gives the healthcare systems of the world a pathway to imitate. The hope is that the healthcare systems of low- and middle-income countries, in particular, will follow in the initiative’s footsteps.
The Indian government aims to broaden “Ayushman Digital” to embrace other facets of healthcare—mental health services, maternal and child welfare, and preventive health services for non-communicable diseases come to mind immediately. But there’s nothing in the architecture of the system to preclude it from extending even further into the realm of public health. Indeed, there’s already discussion about using an integrated platform to tie together all sorts of social services and welfare schemes.
The worldwide health community is keeping a close eye on “Ayushman Digital” and its nascent phase. If it is successfully implemented and scaled-up at the national level, this utility could eventually become a knowledge transfer tool for healthcare across poor and middle-income countries. It could massively reduce their “disease burden”—a nice way to put it—by providing a kind of digitally delivered poor man’s healthcare, in which the only apparent limitation up to now has been the absence of a particular kind of cell phone needed to access the system. Once again, another use of nudge theory that conveys how important it is to understand how these countries are taking action and why effortlessness in these types of campaigns work so well.
- Government of India, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. (2024). Ayushman Digital: Transforming healthcare delivery through digital tools and behavioral insights. Retrieved from https://www.mohfw.gov.in
- Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin Books.
- World Health Organization. (2024). Digital health solutions in low- and middle-income countries: Scaling impact with behavioral economics. Retrieved from https://www.who.int
- Patel, M. S., Asch, D. A., & Volpp, K. G. (2017). Behavioral economics as a strategy to improve health. JAMA, 318(19), 1861-1862.
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