How GenAI Adoption Is Set To Change The Course Of Indian Healthcare

At Inc42, the month of March has been about understanding the impact of GenAI on different sectors and industries and how Indian businesses are adopting this emerging technology to make a dent in their respective areas of operations.

In line with our perusal, we decided to delve deeper into how the GenAI adoption is set to transform the face of the entire healthcare industry — be it robotic surgery or day-to-day patient care. 

What we learnt is that while the Indian healthcare industry is strongly positioned to harness the true potential of GenAI, there remains a dire need to get fundamentals like data accuracy, data security, and ethical implementation in place.

This is crucial at a time when several industry players, including Apollo Hospitals, Max Healthcare and health-focussed startups Healthify, are either leveraging GenAI to raise the healthcare bar in the country or exploring avenues for the same. 

Notably, players like Pfizer, Novartis, Merck, and others are already leveraging GenAI for drug discovery in the global pharmaceutical space.

Today, while the GenAI adoption in the Indian healthcare industry is largely limited to chatbots, Indian startups are increasingly upping the ante to stay abreast of their global peers.

For instance, Peak XV-backed Qure.ai and AngelList India-backed Boltzmann are using GenAI to speed up AI-based research and analysis in the Indian and global markets.

Apart from this, Indian startups are focussed on implementing GenAI in the areas of patient communication, clinical documentation, continuous and remote monitoring, medical imaging interpretation, and enhanced analytics.

Prashant Singh, director and chief information officer at Max Healthcare, said, “Over the next three to five years the Indian healthcare industry’s embrace of GenAI promises transformative changes. From personalised treatment plans to accelerated drug discovery, AI algorithms are being used to optimise patient care and diagnostic accuracy.” 

According to Singh, the emerging tech is also being used to improve rural healthcare access through telemedicine and remote monitoring, streamline administrative tasks, enhance efficiency and reduce costs to make quality healthcare affordable to all.

Patient Support Gets The GenAI Overhaul

As mentioned above, GenAI adoption in India has somewhat become synonymous with building chatbots. Consequently, several GenAI startups specialising in conversational AI are increasingly finding a major use case in the healthcare industry, too.

This has not only enabled a seamless patient-healthcare interface but also streamlined the overall process of patient support.

Rustom Lawyer, cofounder and CEO of Augnito, a healthcare-focussed voice AI solution platform, said that the company has now built a platform called Ambient, which, using its proprietary multi-lingual Medical Speech Recognition and GenAI technology, helps healthcare providers interact with patients without the burden of manual data capture and input.

Lawyer explained that healthcare providers can switch on the Ambient technology app on their smart devices and carry out regular consultations. 

The AI transcribes the entire conversation in real-time, with absolute accuracy and generates a structured Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan (SOAP), which includes data for each field that a doctor would otherwise have to manually fill such as chief complaints, medical history, diagnoses, and recommended plan of care, prescriptions, among others.

“It essentially creates structured data from a natural, free-flowing conversation. This data then gets pushed into the EMR system with a simple voice command,” he said.

It is evident that with GenAI coming into the picture, the efficiency of traditional tools has increased manifold, and hospitals are steadily looking to embrace that change.

Max Healthcare’s Singh, too, said that the hospital chain could deploy GenAI-powered virtual assistants to interact with patients, answer medical queries, and provide personalised health recommendations. 

“These assistants can assist patients in scheduling appointments, refilling prescriptions post doctor’s approval and accessing healthcare services, improving patient engagement and satisfaction,” he added.

However, the adoption of GenAI with existing concerns about hallucinations is likely to encounter significant hurdles.

Here’s a look into major headwinds that the Indian healthcare industry may face with the advent of GenAI 

GenAI Can Speed Up Disease Diagnosis 

GenAI holds significant promise in enhancing the diagnosis process in healthcare. Experts believe that its ability to analyse patient data and generate personalised treatment plans, as well as assist in interpreting medical images like MRI scans, X-rays, and CT scans, can revolutionise disease diagnosis.

Google, for instance, is actively researching how a fine-tuned version of its Gemini model tailored for the medical domain can enhance advanced reasoning. Its MedLM, a family of foundation models for healthcare, is already in experimental phases, aiding medical professionals in classifying chest X-rays for various use cases.

Max Healthcare’s Singh said that the hospital chain has already started using AI-powered tools for its radiology and imaging department across different Max units. 

“These tools empower the users to have early diagnosis and patients to have a better prognosis of diseases,” he said. 

Singh added that Max is exploring different organisations that can translate patient data into proactive diagnosis, provide tailored treatment plans, and analyse patient segments.

As per Singh, Max Healthcare is also looking to leverage GenAI to analyse and interpret genomic data for precision medicine applications. 

“These (GenAI) models can identify genetic variants associated with diseases, predict disease risk and recommend targeted therapies based on individual genetic profiles,” he said, adding that such a personalised approach to healthcare also improves treatment efficacy.

Besides, it is pertinent to note that fitness and healthtech platforms increasingly leverage GenAI capabilities for tracking fitness goals, improving remote diagnosis of diseases, and enabling more effective communication with users.

For instance, Bengaluru-based Healthify has adopted GenAI technology to enhance its chatbot ‘Ria’ and build ‘Snap’ – a photo-to-food recognition system. It enables users to easily find calorie counts of their food by clicking its picture.

The startup claims that GenAI usage has resulted in a 50% increase in food tracking, deeper user engagement, and 18% higher client-coach interaction.

What Lies Ahead?

With GenAI in its nascent stage, experts believe that human intervention will continue to remain key in the Indian healthcare space. 

This is because it has become all the more important to address ethical concerns, ensure data privacy and security and validate the accuracy and reliability of AI-driven solutions before the widespread adoption of this technology.

Both Singh and Lawyer are of the opinion that even though GenAI promises a future of more efficient, accessible, and personalised healthcare in India, addressing data privacy, bias, and infrastructure limitations will be crucial in ensuring its equitable and ethical implementation. 

They added that there are also risks of Intellectual Property (IP) thefts in this space, therefore companies will have to be one step ahead in the GenAI adoption game. 

Meanwhile, Namit Chugh, principal at W Health Ventures, noted that so far, administrative use cases have found more adoption in healthcare.

Despite this, Chugh is extremely bullish on the growth prospect of companies building small language models (SLMs) working on particular diseases such as obesity or cancer. 

He, however, added that going ahead, it would be extremely crucial for startups building healthcare-focussed conversational AI platforms to find the right monetisation and go-to-market strategies. 

Though implementation challenges remain, GenAI-led developments are all set to take the Indian healthcare industry by storm. According to an EY report, pharmaceutical companies should invest in cybersecurity measures like encryption, secure data hosting, and privilege access management to mitigate the risk of IP theft, given the GenAI models are trained on the organisation’s clinical data.

For now, it will be interesting to see how this emerging tech will provide a boost to the Indian pharmaceutical industry, which is expected to become a $130 Bn market opportunity by 2030.

[Edited By Shishir Parasher]