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Ayurveda & EHR Knowledge

Ayurveda and modern healthcare – Part 2: Role in the current health care ecosystem

The heritage – traditional – way of treating ailments and diseases have been prevalent and practiced for over thousands of years in India. We come from a land where ideas about plastic surgeries were discussed and documented long before people across frontiers actually started thinking about such possibilities. Ayurveda is as much of a science as modern medicine and has been continuously evolving over centuries.

However, in the recent past, Ayurveda has been gradually replaced with other alternate forms of healthcare from the west. Despite being a holistic approach to wellness and treatment, cost effective and more holistic, Ayurveda has indeed lost a bit of its ground among the masses.

The reasons for this are aplenty. One of the major reasons has been the inability of Ayurveda and its practitioners to keep up with evolving technologies. While allopathy adapted continuously to technological advancements in terms of equipments, medications and care protocols, Ayurveda remained rooted to it’s traditional ways of treatment and approaches. There has been hardly any restructuring of the infrastructure with respect to technology or use of contemporary technologies to regain lost ground.

Ayurveda practitioners still largely depend upon the century old books and documentation for their practice as attempts at re validating these in the modern context has been minimal. The exploration into creating newer medicines and protocols and evolving the traditional ones to a modern world has not been well organized and widely practiced. Such efforts remain largely hindered, for lack of technology adoption and standardization in Ayurveda.

Ayurinfomatics or the use of information and data in Ayurveda still remains to be a huge hurdle for practitioners as they either don’t believe such practices could be indeed put into action or they don’t have adequate skills and resources to implement their tech-based visions into their Ayurveda clinics.

The Wake Up Call for Ayurveda

However, a more favorable and conducive environment is emerging in the country for Ayurveda and other traditional sciences. This is the ideal opportunity for Ayurveda to resurrect itself into the holistic wellness solution it was meant to be from the beginning. Today’s lifestyle dictate the need for a cost-effective, efficient and wellness focused treatment agendas and techniques. Besides, Ayurveda is both promotive and preventive, further making it the right health care solution for today. Contrary to the side effects of many allopathic medications, Ayurvedic treatments are complementary in nature and holistic in approach.

If we have to be honest, this is the time of aggressive marketing, where drugs and medicines from manufacturers are favored by medical practitioners and the credibility of them are being consistently overlooked. This is exactly what Ayurveda – with its herb-based medications and practices – helps us guard against.

The Challenges

For Ayurveda to become increasingly prominent among people today, it really has to step up its tech infrastructure. Most clinics and treatment centers still use registers for recording of patient details and paper-based prescriptions or medications. There are still no proper ways to track progress and the method of diagnosis is still old school. Ayurveda practitioners need to resolve a few basic challenges together by integrating modern technology into their work and leverage it’s capabilities. They should

  • Use computers in clinics, wellness centers and hospitals
  • Move to electronic health record systems(EHR)
  • Share records of patient information and health details for transparency
  • User data science to process and analyze data for better wellness deliverance and diagnosis

Implementing electronic health records(EHR) systems is one of the best ways to become on par with the competition because the records pave way for personalized health care treatments, more precise diagnosis of ailments, better tracking of patient information, remote retrieval of the information and more. By sharing EHR with your patients, you improve transparency and build long term trust and loyalty.

Government of India has also realized the importance of modern technology and information systems in health care and has come up with Electronic Health Records Standards for India. These standards analyze the diverse aspects of implementing technology and lay out regulations to be followed for uniformity and interoperability. This provides a great opportunity for Ayurveda practitioners to change their conventional working and operating model to adapt to emerging technologies for business and better treatments.

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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.