Digital elixir for healthcare: market intelligence and policy implications

There is an increasing emphasis on digital health. However, success of digital health depends on voluntary adoption, which requires good product–market fit for a wide range of users. A national-level survey through snowball sampling was conducted from November 2020 to March 2021 among all MBBS doctors willing to participate. A total of 1010 doctors from different sectors, locations, qualifications with wide range of experience and patient load participated. Doctors from across the board felt going digital would entail long learning curves, additional workload, more screen time and that they do not improve overall quality of care. Majority feel digital solutions do not help in increasing net revenue and consequently prefer free-of-cost digital solutions. Among those willing to pay, onetime investment for hardware/equipment (38%) followed by annual subscription for software licenses (34%) are the preferred modalities. Seventy-four percent of doctors expressed not being comfortable with government providing digital solutions or controlling the data. In order to make the findings more practical and relevant, digital health adoption curve and market intelligence grid have been proposed. Digital health companies can use the adoption curve to understand how adoption can fluctuate with cost, ease of use and data policy. The grid can help companies identify the requirements of their target segment of doctors and therefore achieve better product–market fit.