One of the biggest beneficiaries of AI is healthcare. A country bogged by gaping patient doctor, patient bed and doctor radiologist ratios, difference of scale between urban and primary healthcare centres, and a sudden emergence of Non Communicable Diseases – India presents a very unique and challenging healthcare landscape to navigate. Added to that, the country is facing one of the biggest healthcare crises in recent times, compelling one to look more closely at these gaps and see how best they can be addressed using AI.

At RAISE 2020, a panel on Connected Healthcare – Last Mile Delivery saw a range of varied speakers discussing that integration, collaboration combined with the transformative power of technology was the way ahead for India to become a digital health nation.

Sunil Wadhwani, founder of the Wadhwani Institute for Sustainable Health and cofounder of Wadhwani AI, was one of the earliest drivers of rural healthcare in India. He recited a story of a poor farming couple he interacted with in rural Rajasthan about a decade ago, where the wife was suffering from high diabetes and the family had no means of providing her the care she needed. He remarked that today, with wearable technologies and instant blood sugar detection kits, her condition could have been indicated much sooner and she could have received timely help. But this is easier said than done. India’s rural and deep interior regions still struggle with limited to no access to healthcare. But what’s different now is the concentrated efforts made by the government in collaboration with private sector entities, to capitalize technology and provide a continuum of care. He elaborated on the National Health Policy, the establishment of Ayushman Bharat and more recently, the National Digital Health Mission as ways to integrate all key stakeholders to impact change. He also spoke of the WISH Foundation that’s using technology extensively to transform primary healthcare. More recently, his endeavor Wadhwani AI with brother Romesh, was started to drive high impact AI projects in healthcare and agriculture – these include TB detection, maternal and fetal care, and precision farming to name a few.

Dr Indu Bhushan, CEO of Ayushman Bharat explained that the government is essentially working on providing an information-laden digital highway and necessary guardrails that can groom innovation. The goals included providing a National Health ID for EMR maintenance, hospital and diagnostic lab network management; a consent framework of aggregated patient information to be used for research and development; policies on health data management; and finally, inclusivity. These make healthcare accessible, effective, inclusive, accountable and more intuitive. Moreover, enhanced public sector participation will extend the use of AI to make this framework smooth.

Dr Sangita Reddy, President FICCI and JMD Apollo Hospitals reflected on her personal journey two decades earlier, when she first made the case for interoperability, IT systems and data integration for enhanced patient care and hospital management. Today, universal healthcare, primary healthcare and data make for the holy trifecta of healthcare, and can propel the continuum of care by leaps and bounds. She also stressed on semantic interoperability, which can be achieved through AI and harnessing the wide amount of healthcare data.

Chris Suter, Head of Digital Cloud Platforms and Innovation, NHS UK spoke about the NHS’ sustained goal of providing the best level of care using technology. In 2018, the UK saw the need for integrated healthcare using data, and making this data meaningful in patient care. He elaborated on the NHS’ use of cloud platforms hosting digital applications, chatbots for better patient communication and ML models to extract and synthesise data from medical records.

Dr Sanjay Padhi, Head of Research AWS & Adjunct Professor, Brown University spoke of data harmonization and genetic sequencing as the future of medicine, and how AI plays a key role in this. Penn Medicine and Cancer Treatment Centers are deploying clinical pathway technologies, and Amazon along with the NIH plans to link biomedical data and researchers. More recently, healthcare providers are using AI in a clinical research study on speeding up the detection of pneumonia, with the support of AWS.

Dr Sreerama Murthy, CEO and Chief Data Scientist, Quadratyx that deploying AI for healthcare needs an outward-in approach – identifying the external challenges and deploying AI accordingly. He recommended that AI can help make core data repositories at the customer layer, optimizing system levels, provide personalized care models, all while keeping the individual at the centre – these steps can make the application of AI in healthcare more effective.