“Although we have achieved mastery over the prevention of infections, been able to eradicate many diseases and assumed technology-assisted procedures with modern medicine, there is a need for large-scale nationalisation of healthcare services. There must be an integrative medicine model of healthcare, emphasis on preventive and promotive components, and incentivisation of ‘healthy family’ concept,” said Dr BN Gangadhar, Padma Shri recipient and Director, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), in his keynote address at Ayusmat 2020, the healthcare summit at IIM Bangalore on February 9.
Ayusmat 2020 was organised by the students of the General Management Programme for Healthcare Executives (GMHE) at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B).
The theme was ‘Disruptive Innovation — The Future Landscape of Healthcare’, which brought together health innovators, investors, and healthcare providers. It rendered a useful platform for participants — healthcare experts, start-ups, investors, and technology innovators — across the ecosphere to network, meet funders when they also learned from the industry’s best and shared their ideas on creating better healthcare outcomes. The focus was on three key areas: Innovation, investment and adoption.
AI in healthcare
The summit had a panel on ‘Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare’, comprising Dr Dhruv Joshi, co-founder at Cloudphysician; Dr Arjun Kalyanpur, Director and Founder at Teleradiology Solutions; Prasad Kompalli, co-founder and CEO at Mfine; and Dr Vishnu Vardhan, COO at DayToDay Health. The discussion was moderated by Prof Shankar Venkatagiri, Programme Director, GMHE.
Speakers included Dr Sharan Patil, Chairman, Sparsh Hospitals, Dr Vidur Mahajan, Head of R&D, Centre for Advanced Research in Imaging, Neurosciences and Genomics, Dr Arjun Arunachalam, Founder and CEO at Voxelgrids Innovations Pvt Ltd, Kishalay Ray, Vice President at Sharp Business Systems (India) Pvt Ltd, and Sakthivel Selvaraj, Director of Health Economics, Financing and Policy at Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI).
“Healthcare managers of the future will be quasi-informaticians,” said Dr Vidur Mahajan, while addressing the audience on ‘Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare’ at the summit. “AI is simply a tool, albeit a powerful and highly accessible one. As AI is percolating into all aspects — preventive and population health, diagnostics, and therapeutics — of healthcare, we are still in the early days due to some fundamental issues like implications of AI, and the technical, ethical and legal consequences. For deploying AI, probably a parallel IT stack would be required. Success will come from technologies that affect the iron triangle with the apexes of cost, quality and access that must be taken care of,” he explained.
A panel discussion on ‘Ecosystem for New Ventures in Healthcare’ comprised Vishal Bali, Executive Chairman, Asia Healthcare Holdings & Co-founder, Medwell Ventures, Dr Aniruddha Malpani, Angel Investor, Malpani Ventures, and Hrishikesh Datar, Founder & CEO, Vakilsearch. Prof Srivardhini Jha, from the Entrepreneurship area at IIM-B, moderated the discussion.