Nandita Saini, Associate Vice President of Engineering, GlobalLogic, discusses the healthtech market in India and the challenges it is currently facing in an insightful conversation with Kalyani Sharma
How do you perceive the growth of healthtech in India compared to global trends, and what unique opportunities do you see in the Indian market?
Global trends in healthcare are driven by renewed interest in M&A activity, IPO’s, leveraging AI for simplifying tasks, increasing productivity, and reducing administrative costs.
According to a Bain & Co report published in Mar 2024, healthcare innovation in India in FY23 was assessed at $30b and was expected to grow to $60b by 2028. Currently, over half of this is export led, but with an increasing domestic investment. The focus of the Indian Healthtech sector is moving from innovating low-cost product and services for India and the world, towards more product, business model or software led innovation for internal and global consumption. This is supported by a positive consumption trend, especially in Pharma services, vaccines, and increasingly also biotech & med tech. Some of the drivers of growth in the past years have been the COVID-19 pandemic, the global drive to move away Pharma supply chains from China and increasing number of FDA and other regulatory approved manufactures in India. Domestic consumers have also matured, and providers are building more integrated services to ease their healthcare journey. Service providers are expanding their patient pools to newer regions. Medtech companies focus on innovative products for domestic and international markets rather than value engineering.
What are the biggest challenges that healthtech companies face in India, particularly regarding regulatory compliance, infrastructure, and patient adoption?
Regulations at every level (state, national and international) can be complex, diverse, and change frequently, and compliance is often a daunting task. The need of the hour is solutions to help compliance & compliance reporting. And this is just a part of the overall healthtech infrastructure that needs to address the current needs of the ecosystem across hospitals, pharma companies, retail pharmacies, patients & families, labs, policy makers and government agencies. A strong collaboration is required across these players, where integration solutions can make the patient journey seamless and the overall operations efficient, transparent and accountable. All these solutions need to be augmented by user friendly, affordable and multilingual digital solutions for the patients that will increase patient adoption across the geo diversity and economic strata.
In terms of AI-driven healthtech solutions, what challenges are specific to India regarding data privacy and ethical considerations?
Healthcare data is protected by the Health Data Management Policy, which is similar to GDPR in Europe. Patient data is also regulated by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and, health-specific data protection frameworks have been proposed in India, including the Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act (DISHA) and the Health Data Management Policy (HDMP). However, AI solutions are driving the need for a superlative level of data access and usage. The government needs to pay urgent attention to assess the level of patient awareness, the consent process and definition of protected data and involved entities, to ensure that citizens are adequately informed, and have better control over their healthcare information.
How can healthtech help bridge gaps in healthcare accessibility and affordability, especially in tier 2 and tier 3 cities?
Healthtech has the ability to transcend the barriers of distance, remote locations, and underserviced communities through digital health solutions such as telehealth, Remote Patient Monitoring, homecare, virtual health, and digital therapeutics. Accessibility and availability make the overall process of healthcare delivery efficient, available and affordable. Government initiatives for health insurance coverage and various other digital initiatives as part of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), combined with the prolifically emerging digital healthtech solutions, have the ability to transform patient awareness and their accessibility to information and solutions. Better informed and connected communities have better confidence and control over their healthcare decisions and journey.
What impact do you anticipate healthtech innovations will have on India’s approach to managing and monitoring chronic diseases?
Healthtech solutions are changing the way we manage chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart diseases and strokes. Be it Remote Patient Monitoring solutions, or the advent of devices such as heart rate monitors, glucose monitors etc., and the sophistication and availability of devices and intelligent solutions has given patients much more control in managing their conditions. Doctors have the ability to monitor and manage their chronic disease patients more efficiently and remotely also. The data coming in through these intelligent solutions can help design new solutions and more effective therapies.
Can you explain the primary goals behind DeviceSure, and how it enhances testing efficiency and compliance in medical devices?
Medtech device testing is critical as it must ensure that devices are safe, reliable, and effective for patients. It requires rigor, should be repeatable and reliable, and should leave no room for human error. It can be time consuming and exhausting. DeviceSure is an AI powered automation testing solution developed by GlobalLogic to bring reliability, efficiency and coverage in critical medtech device testing. It automates test system design, helps build comprehensive test strategies, plans, and scripts, supports execution and documentation of the execution with results from every run, builds test reports with details of any anomalies found, enables traceability metric and provides analysis reports including test coverage.
What is GlobalLogic’s ‘Digital Front Door’?
Improving patient experience in healthcare has become a differentiator for many healthcare providers, and it is increasingly imperative to make investments in simplifying a patient’s interaction with the provider ecosystem to make their journey simple, empathetic and stress-free at a difficult time for them and their families. Based on our experience working with various provider organisations, GlobalLogic has designed an omnichannel Digital Front Door as part of an Intelligent healthcare ecosystem. The solution transforms patient engagement through an integrated platform that streamlines Healthcare interactions, from scheduling and telehealth to real-time health monitoring. It enhances patient experience, gives them better control on their healthcare, improves provider workflows, reduces administrative costs, and enables a more personalised and efficient care journey. It includes a 360° view of the patient to enhance decision-making and care coordination with data and analytics solutions.
What are the future plans of the company? Any new innovations and launches in the pipeline?
GlobalLogic is a trusted partner for many healthcare companies building revolutionary digital solutions across the healthcare ecosystem. We are at the core of the engineering that is building comprehensive solutions impacting areas such as practice management, decentralised clinical trials, revenue cycle management, medtech device software, medtech device testing, payer integrations, homecare solutions, remote patient management, pharmaceutical analytics, pharmacy operations, patient care portals, patient communications, modernisation and cloud migrations for healthcare platforms, and various transformation programs. With the increasing maturity of AI models, we are building solutions that can help the digital transformation of healthcare companies to bring speed and efficiency into their research, operations, workflows and analytics.
Global trends in healthcare are driven by renewed interest in M&A activity, IPO’s, leveraging AI for simplifying tasks, increasing productivity, and reducing administrative costs. M&A activity is strong in medtech and biotech sectors. Pharma and Bio Pharma companies are investing in AI to reduce drug discovery costs and timeline through communed screening, dosage assessment, supply chain efficiency and regulatory filing. Medtech companies are looking for better solutions for disease detection, surgery, image interpretation etc. The demand for better therapies and treatments is also driving the innovation.
According to a Bain & Co report published in Mar 2024, Healthcare innovation in India in FY23 was assessed at ~$30b, and was expected to grow to $60b by 2028. Currently, over half of this is export led, but with an increasing domestic investment. The focus of the Indian healthtech sector is moving from innovating low cost product and services for India and the world, towards more product, business model or software led innovation for internal and global consumption.
This is supported by positive consumption trend, especially in pharma services, vaccines, and increasingly also biotech & med tech. Some of the drivers of growth in the past years have been the COVID-19 pandemic, the global drive to move away pharma supply chains from China, and increasing number of FDA and other regulatory approved manufactures in India. The domestic consumers have also matured, and providers are building more integrated services to ease their healthcare journey. Service providers are expanding their patient pools to newer regions. Medtech companies are focused on innovative products for domestic and international markets rather than value engineering. The talent pool and expertise is increasingly mature, as are the technologies.
The Indian consumers are a diverse set of people with varying needs, challenges and interests. In one end of the spectrum, people may have severe challenges with affordability and access to care. On the other side, there is may be a desire for a seamless end to end experience across the spectrum of healthcare services and in navigating the ecosystem (through doctors, hospitals, insurance, pharmacies, labs etc). Digitisation of healthcare products and services will increasingly need to cater for these needs, and bring more accountability, transparency and integration to make the patient experience seamless, and bring efficiency of operations in the entire ecosystem. Regulations at every level (state, national and international) can be daunting, and soltuions to help compliance is the need of the hour.