Neha became a critical care nurse at Aster CMI Hospital in Bengaluru because she was inspired by her mother, also a nurse. The bedtime stories she was told were different from those of other children. “Sometimes she would take me to the hospital and the patients there were like family to her,” said Neha.
Now Neha can say the same. “We think about our patients even at night,” she said. “If they are going back healed, then we are the happiest. We pray that they never come back to the ICU.” Sometimes, from her heart, she finds herself praying for her patients. At hospitals, she says, more prayers are said than at mosques or temples. “We have seen the needs of patients [at close quarters],” she said. “I have learnt the value of a life….”
Neha’s story was a short film that was played at THE WEEK’s second Health Summit held on October 25 at The Ashok in Delhi. Had best-selling author and life coach Gaur Gopal Das watched it, he would have said that Neha had found purpose in life. After all, it was one of the major themes he dealt with at the summit. “Mark Twain once said that there are two most important days in everyone’s life,” he said. “The day you are born and the day you find out why.”
In fact, purpose has a special meaning in health care. As Riyad Mathew, chief associate editor and director of THE WEEK, said in his presidential address, if a journalist gets an exit poll wrong using technology, it might not matter much, but if a doctor gets something wrong, it could be a matter of life and death. No one has seen this sacredness of life at closer quarters than those working in the health care industry. Each of the eminent delegates at the summit spoke on different aspects of health care, but what united them was a passion for purpose-driven medicine.
For Dr Jame Abraham, head of oncology at Cleveland Clinic in the US, purpose meant the privilege of offering someone hope when they are at their most vulnerable. For Narayanan Venkatasubramanian, founder of the health-tech startup Peptris, purpose lay in focusing on the oft-neglected area of rare diseases in India to which many big pharmaceutical companies give a wide berth. For Lisa Ray, actor, entrepreneur and cancer survivor, purpose meant coming out in public about her fight with multiple myeloma which kept her from “spiralling into despair”.
The varied background of all the stakeholders who participated in the summit, from heads of pharmaceutical companies to founders of health-tech startups to doctors from some of the biggest hospitals in the country, lent a different flavour to each of the 12 sessions at the day-long event. If Das enlightened and entertained the audience while conveying deep truths through light-hearted stories of brick-layers and egg-laying roosters, Dr Madhu Sasidhar, president of the Apollo Group of Hospitals, hit a more sobering note by elaborating on how an ageing planet will fundamentally change health care. Kedir Awol Omar, India head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, combined passion and compassion when he spoke about his desire to bring health care to people in remote areas, while Dr M. Srinivas, director of AIIMS in Delhi, emphasised his commitment to bring innovative, accessible, and scalable solutions to patient care.
The summit was inaugurated by Anupriya Patel, Union minister of state for health & family welfare, who congratulated THE WEEK for its pioneering role in health reporting. It concluded with our first Healing Touch Award which was presented to renowned surgical oncologist Dr R. Ravi Kannan and received on his behalf by his wife, Seetha Lakshmi Raghavachary. Kannan, who moved to Assam’s Silchar in 2007, was honoured with the Magsaysay Award in 2023 for “providing hope and healing in cancer care”. The summit was powered by Apollo Hospitals, and supported by Manipal Hospitals, Skanray Technologies, The New India Assurance Co. and Murli Krishna Pharma.
A dominant theme at the summit was the use of AI and technology in health care. Twelve years ago, during THE WEEK’s first health summit in 2012, AI was not even in the picture. The focus areas then were on creating better doctors, a national database, affordable insurance, and tech innovations. Today, the scene has significantly changed. Ninety-two per cent of leading health care companies see promise in generative AI and 75 per cent are already experimenting with it, said Siddharth Bagga, Google’s head of health care. He said at Google health, the emphasis is on developing personalised health insights for consumers to take better control of their health (think scanning your eyes using your phone camera to check if you have diabetic retinopathy); making available the vast amounts of data generated through wearables and other health trackers “so that we can understand what is happening at the population level and then personalise that for our users”; and working with caregivers and clinicians in areas like nurse handovers in hospitals when a lot of information is lost when nurses change shifts.
However, most of the speakers emphasised that AI must be used judiciously. According to Achin Gupta, CEO, One India Business, Cipla, AI offers infinite possibilities, but one must not deploy AI for the sake of deploying it. “The challenge is in finding the right use cases where you can actually put it to use,” he said.
AI can never replace a doctor was the universal consensus. “Will AI save a million lives? I say doctors using AI will save a million lives,” said Dr Sudarshan Ballal, chairman of Manipal Hospitals, during a session moderated by Riyad Mathew on what the hospitals of the future will be like. Technology is going to come into medicine in a big way, whether it is AI, big data, or the Internet of Things, added Dr Randeep Guleria, chairman, internal medicine, at Medanta. But at the centre of everything is the patient. Medicine is both an art and a science, he said. The art of medicine is very important when it comes to talking with patients, listening to them, and showing empathy. “That role is very important and AI can’t replace that,” said Guleria.
According to the speakers at the summit, despite health care in India advancing in leaps and bounds, there are still some problem areas. For example, India missed out on the manufacture of engineered antibodies, which is the future in diseases like cancer, said Sam Santosh, a biotechnology expert who is known as the father of Indian genomics. India has so far okayed only 25 of the 100-plus approved antibodies worldwide, he said. The way forward lies in better integration between clinicians and researchers, utilising the existing manufacturing facilities to produce antibodies, and uniform collection of clinical data across all health care facilities. “We need our own data,” he said. “Otherwise, we won’t know which drugs should be a priority for our population.”
Another challenge lies in getting regulatory approvals for clinical trials and new drugs. “In the startup space, time is everything,” said Padmini Janaki, CEO and co-founder of the health-tech startup, Mind & Mom. “If I have raised funds to do certain things, I can’t be waiting for approvals for 13 months. Then I am already out of the business. I’m in a proper health care business where I have to show revenue.”
“We entered the regulations game much later than other countries,” added Arindam Sen, director of Heartnet India. “We can’t say China took 15 years to get there and so we will also take that time. We have to do it in months.”
Despite these challenges, the prospects for health care in India look bright. As Alisha Moopen, managing director at Aster DM Healthcare GCC, pointed out, a lot of exciting innovation is happening here. “Twelve years ago, when we built our flagship in Kochi—Aster Medcity—we introduced the da Vinci [surgical robot]. Fast-forward 10 years, and we came out with da Vinci Xi and now we have the SSI Mantra, made in India at a fraction of the cost, which makes me so proud. So many departments are using it for so many different cases. That is going to be the lesson from India to the world. How do you make health care more affordable? It is easier for the GCC with its smaller population, government funding and role of private entities. But [with our tech innovations], India is solving much larger issues for the world.”
Technology is usually linked to making things impersonal, and medicine is no exception. With the advancement of sophisticated diagnostic technologies, imaging and lab tests, doctors are less in touch with their patients. But what the experts pointed out at the summit was that this need not be the case. There was no need for technology to hinder the humanity in medicine. In fact, it can enhance it as, using technology, doctors can save many more lives.
Take the case of Dr Sreenivas Raju Kalindindi, a radiologist at Apollo. His father was a rural doctor in India and the only physician for an entire village. All he had was a stethoscope and a microscope. Still, he saved a lot of lives and that was the inspiration for Kalindindi to become a doctor. In partnership with Google, Kalindindi and his team at Apollo introduced an initiative to detect tuberculosis using AI, where vans equipped with X-ray machines were sent into villages. Patients could come and be screened for TB. Their X-rays would then be transmitted to a central location where AI would give an immediate interpretation about the likelihood of TB which would later be confirmed by a radiologist. As part of the initiative, Google and Apollo Radiology are donating millions of AI-powered screenings for detecting tuberculosis. “My father had a lot of TB patients,” said Kalindindi in a video clip that Google’s Bagga showed during his presentation. “If he had access to something like this, he would have been able to save a lot of lives.”
As a magazine which practises “journalism with a human touch”, THE WEEK finds the future of tech-aided health care that is more about ‘healing’ than ‘curing’, immensely exciting. To herald that future, we remain committed to reporting on health with passion, precision, and above all, with purpose.