Road to India@100: A tech reboot to ensure healthcare for all

My vision for India in 2047 envisages a healthcare landscape that is both advanced and affordable. Not just for a few, but for the masses. Not just for India, but for the globe.

I foresee a future where a focus on preventive healthcare will proactively prevent illness and bring down the disease burden. Where predictive healthcare will substitute the need for reactionary interventions and where personalised solutions will form the crux of all therapeutic endeavours.

The convergence of health tech, digital, media and mobile telecommunications will completely revolutionise India’s healthcare system by the time the country celebrates the 100th year of its Independence.

Convergence of IT and life sciences is making an impact: The convergence of information technology and life sciences is creating a more resilient, agile and innovative healthcare system in India and across the globe. We already see signs of this happening. The eSanjeevani telemedicine service had served 76 million patients by December 1, 2022. The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium, or INSACOG, had sequenced over 250,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes till November 2022. Recent advances in AI applications have enabled clinicians to rapidly interpret radiology exams like X-rays and CT scans. Over 80 per cent of healthcare professionals in the country are using electronic health records (EHRs) in their practice leading to better quality of care and patient outcomes. Portable diagnostics available on smartphones and tablets are enabling our frontline health workers and technicians in early detection of diseases such as breast and oral cancers. These examples illustrate that we are at the cusp of an interesting revolution where the future of medicine and biotech belongs.

Technological excellence helped India tackle Covid-19: The tectonic shifts caused by Covid-19 brought the Indian biotechnology and biopharma industry into the global limelight. Thanks to the intensive use of technology, India had administered over 2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines till November 2022. Technology led to exponential growth in our testing capacity from one test conducted in the lab at the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, in January 2020 to nearly a billion (0.9 billion) Covid-19 tests conducted up to November 30, 2022 (per ICMR data).

Reimagining health in India in the next 25 years: The healthcare of the future will stand on three pillars: Preventive, Predictive, and Personalised. In 2047, healthcare can look something like this for a person living in a remote village in Ladakh. A person having a persistent cough for a week will be able to launch an app on their smartphones and speak into it. This app, using speech recognition and NLP (natural language processing) algorithms, would then ask the person to cough and enquire about symptoms. In the background, an AI-based screener will run diagnostics on the recording using sounds, symptoms and a population disease surveillance system.

Since a doctor consultation is necessary as soon as possible, a scheduling engine will check for availability among both government and private healthcare providers using the Unified Health Interface (UHI) and Health Professionals Registry. Meanwhile, a doctor in New Delhi will receive a notification from a UHI-registered platform on the scheduled teleconsultation with the patient from Ladakh.

A smartphone app will help the patient record breathing rate and heart rate and the data will get captured to a FIHR-compliant Electronic Health Record database without the need to make manual entries. In Delhi, the doctor will be able to review online summaries of the patient’s screening report, health history and their family health history to eliminate the possibilities of Covid-19 or tuberculosis as the likely cause for the cough.

The consultations will happen over video using the eSanjeevani platform. After confirming the symptoms and history, the doctor would be able to ask the patient follow-up questions. On the doctor’s request, the patient will be able to measure their blood pressure, blood oxygen levels and heart rhythm and electrical activity using a wearable cuff and share it instantly with the doctor. The doctor will be able to prescribe the necessary medicines and in a few minutes a drone will be dispatched from the closest pharmacy with medicines to the location shared by the patient.

Later in the day, a mobile clinic equipped with point-of-care screening tech would reach the patient’s location for further tests to rule out any other potential cause for the cough.

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to access appropriate medical care and follow-up in the remotest parts of the country thanks to India’s universal health coverage system designed with citizens’, health workers’ and professionals’ needs at its heart and powered by tech.

The future of pharma in India: The future of tech and pharma is as much about political and cultural leadership as it will be about the science and technology itself. India must propel its R&D ecosystem forward with public and private support to make products affordable, not only for its own citizens, but also for patients across the globe. For this, future governments will need to implement policies that can attract and retain the world’s most brilliant scientists and engineers. Public and private funding will be vital for the creation of Centres of Excellence to ideate and aim at ‘moonshots’.

An interconnected world will call for partnerships and collaborations in a boundary-less manner and the Indian government will need to implement policies that make it easy for R&D and partnerships to thrive. Life technologies should be a key thrust area for India’s economic development and the government will need to take a strategic approach to position India at the forefront of this transformational sector.

Incremental steps will not make universal healthcare a reality for the 1.64 billion people projected to be living in India by 2047. We will need to approach the digital transformation of healthcare in mission mode. The road is long, but we have all the ingredients to succeed. If we do so, we can be a scientific powerhouse of the world and create one of the greatest legacies for a healthy and prosperous future by the time we mark the centenary of India’s independence.

The writer is Chairperson of Biocon and Biocon Biologics