Madhav BissaProgram Director, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Nasscom ETHealthWorld’s spoke to Pratibha Raju On the need to create better AI Health care The model and how it will advance the use of data can play a key role in realizing India’s 2025 vision of inclusive growth and deliver over $500 billion in value to the economy.
AI is certainly disruptive in some areas, but how does it address critical challenges in the health sector?
AI is no longer just an innovative technology, but a strategic imperative to address the evolving complex challenges in the healthcare industry. Some of these challenges include data overload, human errors, solving the complexities of medical imaging and managing the workload of healthcare staff and medical providers during emergencies. AI has the potential to offer an agile operating framework that balances healthcare solutions and manages back-end processes seamlessly. It also helps in optimizing costs and helps in the development of various products and services. It is aligned with multiple applications in the healthcare industry and continues to evolve with technological advancements. AI has the potential to enhance preventive care and offer more accurate diagnoses, leading to better healthcare outcomes.
Additionally, AI helps in predicting and tracking rare diseases, helping medical practitioners fight many pandemics and epidemics globally. The technology also helps extract more data sets from a single image and at the same time provides unparalleled security for stored data. According to NASSCOM’s AI Adoption Index, AI has opened up multiple avenues for improving healthcare systems and is expected to add $25 billion in economic value to India by 2025.
What kind of impact is AI bringing to the healthcare ecosystem, how will it transform when it comes to public health in India?
India’s healthcare market has grown 3X+ from $110 billion in 2016 to $372 billion in 2022. Rising incomes, awareness of self-care and more state-led health initiatives have been fueled by sophisticated healthcare technologies. From remote diagnostics to robotic surgeries to preventive healthcare analytics, the scope of AI has expanded greatly, enabling the healthcare ecosystem to reach higher standards in patient care and management.
AI has huge potential to streamline the public healthcare segment, increase its efficiency and transform it into a world-class service. Technology has been very helpful in India’s fight against Kovid-19. It has helped in early detection of Covid-19 cases, containment of coronavirus, contact tracing, enforcement of quarantine and social distancing, tracking of suspects, treatment and remote monitoring of Covid-19 patients, vaccine and drug development, etc. , AI provides proper monitoring of health facilities, allowing doctors and officials to take appropriate decisions and solve public health problems by analyzing data in real time.
Going forward, to make the role of technology in public health more prominent, the government needs to encourage the healthcare sector to adopt new-age technologies, it can further encourage public-private partnerships in the field of AI and health, bring forward creative policies. which has the potential to address issues such as AI-driven healthcare data privacy.
Can you tell us how AI can streamline healthcare data in both the private and public healthcare domains?
The public healthcare domain requires a holistic and nationwide healthcare system that can not only serve the population at large, but also predict outbreaks in a timely manner, enable treatment strategies and optimize health resource allocation. And AI enables the development of such systems on a large scale in a short period of time. One of the key success factors for successful implementation of this type of healthcare system is streamlining the acquired data.
An inherent characteristic of building a good AI model is the ability to identify, manage and visualize data that comes from different sources and is of different types. Thus, the implementation of AI models will ensure that the data obtained and used are well organized, otherwise the models may not produce reliable and relevant outputs that are important for public health management.
By using AI-based applications combined with effective data management practices, hospitals can acquire and analyze patient data effectively and efficiently, enabling them to offer telemedicine and teleconsultation with better treatment success rates. Hospitals can devise effective data usage strategies to help drive efficiencies in not only patient service but also their operations. AI, thus, helps hospitals streamline supply chains and operations.
With the advent of wearables, the increase in volume, variety and velocity of data generation is streamlining at the individual level. With the use of AI, data is regularly analyzed and relevant diagnoses are made for prescription recommendations, which simplifies the jobs of healthcare professionals in terms of patient data management and treatment.
The importance of data and digital transformation has increased manifold in the last few months. Covid-19 has brought to the fore the importance of digital technologies, including data and artificial intelligence, to address the healthcare crisis, restart supply chains and enable telemedicine and teleconsultation. The time has become critical that rapid steps are taken to further enhance data and AI capabilities in all sectors, especially in health, as the country leverages tech’s ability to deliver real-time technological impact in businesses and societies. Driving use of data and AI can play a key role in realizing India’s 2025 vision of inclusive growth and deliver over $500 billion in value to the economy.
In the healthcare segment, effective data utilization strategies can lead to timely prediction of epidemic outbreaks, enable remote diagnosis and treatment, and help optimize health resource allocation.
Healthcare is never going back to the way it was before the pandemic. So, how will AI revolutionize and change patient engagement with healthcare providers?
Advances in technology and regulatory frameworks are finally realizing long-standing efforts by doctors to personalize patient care. Initially, this was just basic telehealth, but now, thanks to AI-powered insights from data collected by both healthcare professionals and patients, we can identify at-risk individuals earlier than ever and treat them with the best possible solution: customized Plan action that takes into account their needs and lifestyle. According to a Deloitte study, 90 percent of healthcare leaders also believe that AI initiatives are important for organizations to stay competitive in the marketplace and help patients.
Patient engagement, often referred to as the ‘last mile’ of healthcare delivery and a critical factor that can mean the difference between positive and negative health outcomes, as well as customer satisfaction, can potentially benefit profoundly from AI. Without increasing the workload of healthcare professionals, AI enables providers to more fully engage patients appropriately, fill gaps in care, and motivate patients to change their behavior (and, in some cases, reduce that workload). As we move into this TakedayWe can expect the future of healthcare services to be more fluid in nature with a mix of digital and physical touchpoints aided by the use of new age technologies.
How is NASSCOM helping the government to promote the digital agenda in India’s healthcare infrastructure to make it more resilient and future-ready?
For the digital transformation of Indian healthcare, NASSCOM Center of Excellence CoE-IoT & AI (a MeitY project with state governments) has created the Healthcare Innovation Challenge (HIC). The aim of this unique innovation challenge is to find solutions to the problems faced by healthcare providers adopting digital technology. The main goals of HIC are to drive operational excellence by enabling administrative process automation and clinical workflow digitization by adopting digital technology solutions; enabling healthcare providers to nominate use cases for digital solutions tailored to their needs; and to drive programs to enable the curation, evaluation and deployment of technology-leading innovative solutions that address nominated use cases.
What is the focus of NASSCOM’s AI for Good initiative in the healthcare community?
The fundamental purpose of innovation and the use of AI is to improve people’s lives. India must create AI solutions that not only transform corporations but also empower individuals, promoting sustainable growth. The goal of AI for Good in the healthcare industry is to accelerate research and innovation, accelerate manufacturing, and expand the supply base by bringing together the entire ecosystem. There is a three-pronged strategy to significantly impact India’s healthcare delivery:
- Discover the best innovations: Through the largest HealthTech Innovation Challenges at regular intervals, together with industry and government.
- Create and demonstrate solutions: Collaboratively design solutions with support from the healthcare ecosystem, including government and regulatory bodies
- Pilot and scale solution adoption: Launch pilot projects in the public and private healthcare delivery space and increase adoption across the country.
