Category: Yoga & EHR

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Ayurveda and Modern Healthcare – Part 3: Opportunity to Reinvent & Rejuvenate to recapture lost ground

Ayurveda-Opportunity to Reinvent & Rejuvenate to recapture lost ground

Despite being one of the oldest and most credible medical practices in India, Ayurveda has resonance only among a limited percentage of population in the country. The comprehensive umbrella of AYUSH, which comprises of streams of treatment practices such as Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and more are known for their effectiveness. However, the patronage of such Indic practices have been very feeble when compared to the Western practices like Allopathy.

An NSSO survey as recent as in the year 2015 reveals that over 90% of the population in both the rural and urban settlements in India preferred allopathy for diagnosis and treatment. The percentage of population that resorted to AYUSH was less than 7% in both the demographics. Though the trend would now be slightly better with the government pushing AYUSH adoption through its educational programs, institutes, wellness centres and regulations, the numbers would be just slightly higher.

The onset of Disruptive Technology

One of the major reasons allopathy has gained a very strong foothold across the globe is because of its adaptability. It has been evolutionary in its journey, adopting modern technologies and trends as they arrived. In recent times, allopathy was quick to adopt the cloud-based tech revolution – Electronic Health Records(EHR) – for its practice and wellness deliverance. With individuals’ medical data stored on the clouds, this ensured people from any part of the world received standardized treatment and diagnosis. Since the data is stored on the cloud, it allowed doctors and medical practitioners to retrieve the data and provide better and personalized healthcare services to patients.

Failure to catch up with technology

The reason for allopathy gaining traction is also the reason why Ayurveda couldn’t evolve as a popular healthcare practice. There are several factors Ayurveda can consider and work on to make it mainstream once again. Today, technology has evolved to an extent that virtual bots are able to detect the most minute presence of ailments in the human body that veteran doctors couldn’t spot. Since healthcare is an evidence-based service, we have diverse technologies today that work on gathering evidence through data.

With the record of patients’, doctors are now able to not just describe and prescribe medications and ailments but predict as well. The government has also come up with regulatory bodies, national policies and standards to benchmark the adoption of technology in healthcare and pave way for regularized, cost-effective and precise treatments.

Opportunity to Reinvent and Rejuvenate

Every new technology or concept has multiple aspects of adoption and Ayurveda has to improve technology adoption in its practices to gain more patronage. Ayurveda practitioners should work on three aspects of development to make the practices mainstream –

  • Build a supportive and sustainable ecosystem
  • Bring more transparency and record keeping
  • Understand and implement standards

Building an ecosystem means that the practitioners should look for more specific ways to adopt and leverage today’s technology. The use of EHR and clinical management systems in their resorts, retreats, clinics and hospitals is an ideal way to make the best out of tech and establish credibility among people and patients. Once the measures to generate, store, retrieve and share data are in place, the practitioners should focus on streamlining healthcare practices.

Patients gain trust on science when they are informed about the procedures and concept behind it. Ayurveda practitioners should aim to achieve the same through the use of EHR. A transparent treatment agenda will not just build trust but spread patronage as well. This treatment practice will further reflect on the outcomes of the practices in the fact that patients will be able to follow medications, therapies or remedies more judiciously.

With the onset of AyushEHR from HealtheLife, there cannot be a better time to kick start the evolutionary process for Ayurveda. Our cloud-based solution tackles any shortcoming your clinic or retreat is likely to face in terms of management and wellness deliverance. With the opportunity to reinvent and rejuvenate Ayurveda ripe, you can get in touch with us to leverage disruptive technology to grow fast.

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Knowledge Yoga & EHR

Yoga and modern healthcare – Part 1 : Journey from ancient empirical wisdom to modern validated wellness science

Today, across India and also in many other countries across the world you can see people from diverse backgrounds practising and getting oriented to yoga. Over the past few years, yoga has become immensely popular around the world and it’s adoption has been increasing at an increasing pace. Through body postures and oneness exercises, yoga brings about progress and well-being not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well.

It all started around 5000 years ago, where the first references of yoga have been found as palm-leaf inscriptions and oral knowledge passed over generations. Some researchers believe that yoga and the practice of it might have existed even earlier to that. Like many other spiritual and metaphysical ideas that has influenced human thinking across the world, yoga, again went from India to the West and came back more refined and aligned to modern scientific practices, as an effective solution to many of our physical and spiritual concerns.

When you try to trace the history and development of yoga, you can classify it’s history into four distinct eras.

Pre-classical Yoga

It was the region of Indus-Sarasvati, where one of the first instances of yoga developed. Rig Veda, which is considered to be the world’s oldest sacred text, had some of the earliest mentioning of yoga. Apart from songs, hymns, rituals and mantras saints, rishis and yogis practised yoga and documented their experiences in Upanishads. One of the most prominent scriptures of the Upanishads is the Bhagavat Gita, which laid the foundation of practice of ego sacrifice through action, wisdom and knowledge about oneself, talks about the inner struggle for self-mastery and the attainment of happiness through yoga.

Classical

After its earlier advent, there appeared to be a few contradictions and confusions among the yogic practices. It was not until the Classical era that the practices of yoga were standardised. Yoga was first given a systematic approach through Patanjali Yoga Sutras, which classified the practice of yoga into 8 stages. Each step gradually led towards Samadhi or ultimate enlightenment. The Patanjali yoga is regarded as the father of Yoga and is a major influence in modern day yogic practices.

Post-Classical

After the advent of Patanjali yoga, the rishis and saints formulated a concept of yoga practices that revolved around body and life force. Tantra yoga was developed as a way to cleanse the mind and body for the attainment of enlightenment. This deep exploration in the connection between mind and body that was started by tantra yoga – physical and spiritual nature – led to the development of Hatha yoga later.

Modern Era

It was the early 1900’s, that yoga began crossing international frontiers and barriers. Its healing and self-exploratory nature attracted immense following from people of other continents. Further it’s proponents and practitioners travelled, the more it gained patronage. The speech of Swami Vivekananda in Chicago at the 1893 Parliament of Religions was a critical turning point in the spread of yoga to the west. As far as Hatha yoga is concerned, the works of T.S Krishnamacharya was prominent. His contribution and popularisation of practices garnered mass attraction in the West and the spread of yoga achieved its peak when Indra Devi established a studio in 1947 in Hollywood.

Practice of yoga is on the cusp of another major revolution as it is getting integrated into all popular health and wellness practices. Such modern wellness solutions are information driven and use data gathered during it’s practice to continuously improve their effectiveness. It is now an accepted wisdom that you can impart better treatment agendas and wellness practices in your yoga retreat when you use modern technologies like Electronic Health Records(EHR) to combine problem diagnosis and treatments with other health data of the person. Further, a living science such as yoga, has to continuously use data generated during practice to validate its effectiveness, evolve better protocols and create a paradigm shift in healthcare to the management of holistic wellness.

To know how technology can bring about change in your yoga retreat, please read more about AyushEHR.

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Ayurveda & EHR Knowledge Yoga & EHR

Compelling Reasons Why Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy Needs to adopt Information Technology

Globally, there are over 500,000 practitioners of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy. This statistics makes it one of the most prevalent systems of medicine and in India, its significance is something phenomenal. Despite its prominence, a more digitized and streamlined way patients’ data is stored, managed and retrieved is still missing. On the contrary, western medicine have integrated chests of patient information systems that is available to clinicians and doctors, allowing them to virtually know an individual’s medical record. However, Ayurveda still awaits a call for integrated technologies and solutions. On this article, we will delve into why Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy needs to adopt information technology to bring about significant changes.

The 3 most widely used tools in healthcare and their advantages are as below

Hospital Information System(HIS)

One of the major advantages of integrating HIS with Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy healthcare practices is that it paves way for seamless everyday operation. It allows clinicians to set reminders, tasks and alerts for patients and enable better engagement with them. For instance, sending out appointment reminders a day prior to the actual date, send follow-ups through emails or phone calls, reminders to schedule appointment for patients’ next visit, and more.

Besides, it also fosters a better supply-chain ecosystem, where your inventory of supplements are better monitored and maintained. HIS solutions are designed to keep track of your item dispenses and intimate you the expiring and low-on-stock items. These are the two major aspects when it comes to managing a clinic and those that require a lot of paperwork and efforts. HIS can give you real-time information on reports such as aging reports, summaries of supplies dispensed, reports on your services, trends, customer account statements and more.

Digitizing them and bringing all of them to one single portal makes operations interoperable. It also betters your engagement with patients by allowing you to send newsletters, information on any upcoming events, research or promotions, birthday emails and more.

Electronics Health Records (EHR)

EHR is a digital repository of patients’ health record. When you integrate a solution for your Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy healthcare practices, you create an environment for improved practice performances and measurement of key metrics. The analytics modules allow you to find meaningful insights on patients’ record and give you real-time information on the progress of treatment, trends in key diagnostic parameters, overall disease trends across patients and also decision support tools.

Customer Portal

Having a patient portal is inevitable today. It not just ensures a better healthcare practice but also allows you to formulate better treatment agendas and plans. Since this is centralized, any clinician or a practitioner of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy can retrieve a patient’s health record and plan out medications and treatments. With the massive chunks of information on the patient in hand, the clinicians would also be able to make better and informed decisions and see trends through the solution’s analytics portal.

When information technology is rightly incorporated, you will experience better management of data and operations and find aspects for improvement in administration, patient engagement and healthcare practices. The technology is efficient, cost-effective and is inevitable today that will go on to become revolutionary tomorrow. With the renewed focus once again on Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy as mainline healthcare practices, it is important that the proponents leverage technology to ride this wave and take their crafts far and wide.

AyushEHR is a standards compliant EHR with integrated customer portal. To get a personalized advantages list of how an EHR and customer portal can work wonders for your organization, speak or get in touch with us.