Delivering High-Quality, Equitable Care in India: An Ethically-Resilient Framework for Healthcare Innovation After COVID-19

Developing countries struggle to provide high-quality, equitable care to all. Challenges of resource allocation frequently lead to ethical concerns of healthcare inequity. To tackle this, such developing nations continually need to implement healthcare innovation, coupled with capacity building to ensure new strategies continue to be developed and executed. The COVID-19 pandemic has made significant demands of healthcare systems across the world—to provide equitable healthcare to all, to ensure public health principles are followed, to find novel solutions for previously unencountered healthcare challenges, and to rapidly develop new therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19. Countries worldwide have struggled to accomplish these demands, especially the latter two, considering that few nations had long-standing systems in place to ensure processes for innovation were on-going before the pandemic struck. The crisis represents a critical juncture to plan for a future. This future needs to incorporate a vision for the implementation of healthcare innovation, coupled with capacity building to ensure new strategies continue to be developed and executed. In this paper, the case of the massive Indian healthcare system is utilized to describe how it could implement this vision. An inclusive, ethically-resilient framework has been broadly laid out for healthcare innovation in the future, thereby ensuring success in both the short- and the long-term.