Chapter 10: Digital Health Innovation: Emergence of Digital Medical Consumer (DMC) and Holistic Digital Health Start-Ups (HDHSs)

One of the major change drivers which emerged in the 21st century is the birth of the internet. Internet-led digitalisation has impacted almost all the sectors across the board positively and in some cases negatively. The healthcare sector is no exception to the transformation. We are witnessing dramatic changes in the healthcare sector across all its verticals due to increasing digital health innovations. The Government of India is aggressively pushing for digital health reforms in India. The inception of key healthcare digitalisation initiatives, like national digital health mission, legalisation of telemedicine, E-pharmacies and the Health ID project, indicates the government’s strong resolve towards taking forward the digitalisation transformation at a rapid pace.

All these digital health innovations led to new strata of medical consumers like Digital Medical Consumers. In this chapter, a conceptual framework of three types of medical consumers based on their buying behaviour has been postulated. In addition, digital health innovations are playing a major role in the evolution of the holistic digital health ecosystem in India. We anticipate the evolution of Holistic Digital Health Start-ups (HDHSs) because of the government’s push towards digitalisation in health and its subsequent willingness to create digital health infrastructure and the rising penetration of health informatics. Hence, this paper has proposed a conceptual framework for Holistic Digital Health Start-ups (HDHSs).