Indian healthcare advances with connected devices and AI-powered voice assistants

Bengaluru, October 29, 2022:

Healthcare is undergoing a digital transformation with connected devices and AI-powered voice assistants. From interacting with medical professionals, use of telemedicine, to data access by physicians and streamlining administrative tasks has changed the face of healthcare.
 
According to Punit Singh Soni, founder and CEO, Suki, technology solutions are the most scalable and powerful. This is attributed to the advances in cloud computing and off-the-shelf AI tools. Solutions can now be easily deployed to large populations of users via the web or as an app. The days of large, complex installations on ‘on-premise’ servers are over. Leveraging off-the-shelf AI tools means highly sophisticated solutions are available with less development time. Health systems and users benefit from lower prices, more functionality, and a rapid cadence of innovation, all which help drive adoption at scale.
 
Technology can drive enormous change in India’s healthcare system, which grapples with two major issues: accessibility and affordability. Telemedicine and other modalities of delivering care remotely can greatly improve access, especially for rural patient populations where traveling to see a clinician in person can be incredibly onerous, he added.
 
AI solutions that enable physicians to effectively monitor large patient cohorts, such as remote patient monitoring tools, or help them make treatment decisions, like diagnostic solutions, can not only help improve quality of care, they can also drive down cost by making physicians more efficient. Even solutions that aren’t directly involved with patient care can deliver meaningful benefits. For example, physicians who use AI-powered voice assistants to save time on documentation and other tasks have more bandwidth for patient care, said Soni.
 
For technology solutions to reach their full potential, partnership with the public sector is key. Policies to drive industry wide technology adoption and interoperability of those systems is critical. Government initiatives like Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, which intends to create a national digital health infrastructure and an open network for exchange of data between different providers and users, is a step in the right direction, he noted.
 
With the current state of technology and government support in leveraging tech tools in the industry, there has never been a more exciting time for healthcare in India.  In the coming years, India has the potential to emerge as one of the most innovative countries in the world for using technology to improve care, said Soni. Pharmabiz