What is a smart city if there is no smart healthcare? But latest spectacles of mess emerging from Chikungunya and Dengue menace ravaging Delhi, the capital of India, hardly indicates we are in for even a semblance of smart healthcare. Smartphone is being flaunted as a harbinger of smart healthcare, and truly so, saying where doctors fear to tread, smart phones already are homing birds even in far flung and inaccessible areas of India and that this handy machine would make distance between super specialists and areas eternally starved of healthcare infrastructure and skilled health workers immaterial. The buzzword is smart healthcare is where Smartphone is.

As big daddy of App, Mark Zuckerberg, in his new great and most ambitious initiative (you can call it Zuckercare also if you will, on the line of Obamacare) has taken upon himself to help scientists to cure, prevent or manage all diseases within ‘our children’s lifetime’, be sure breathtaking health Apps and new tools to make healthcare smart and very smart at that, are in the offing which would certainly transform the global healthcare. Armed with massive smart phone penetration, India stands to gain from this transformation. India can leverage this advantage to make universal quality healthcare a reality. The central government, which is hard pressed to offer universal healthcare, should sit up and start formulating mHealth friendly laws to welcome new age medicine. Universal healthcare with meagre investment- what more India can wish whose public expenditure in health is abysmally low! India must climb up the bus of App driven smart healthcare.

But is Smartphone is a magic wand that would herald smart healthcare in a flourish? Smart healthcare means affordable quality treatment even without high tech infrastructure and specialists at hand. But distance alone is not a hurdle in taking quality healthcare far and wide. For a patient from Bihar in AIIMS, waiting for his turn to come, is as far away from the apex government hospital as when he was in Bihar. An overburdened AIIMS itself look like a patient. When the age of smart healthcare dawns on India, and that must in time, AIIMS like hospital would have to give an impression of being ultra smart.