AI in healthcare improving patient outcomes, can offer curated treatments | Mint

India’s digital health market has seen a sharp rise in the past decade, and is expected to grow tenfold in the next decade. Now in its second leg of growth with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), industry experts believe that the focus will be on accessibility and making healthcare more curated for the patients. 

A panel discussion at the Mint AI Summit 2025 in Bengaluru deliberated on the subject in detail.

Jayanth N. Kolla, founder and partner, Convergence Catalyst, who moderated the discussion, started proceedings by saying that in the space of healthcare, a lot of data is being created and digital technologies  have been revolutionizing healthcare. “I think after BFSI, healthcare was the industry which was being digitalized and for the last 10-15 years we’ve seen a lot of digital technologies  being adopted in the healthcare space,” he said.

Abhinav Lal, co-founder and chief technology officer of healthtech platform Practo, said that his company is building some very useful products using AI and then taking them “back to our provider partners [to] help them in their day-to-day work, and more importantly, help them improve outcomes”. 

“This time around, there is a lot of focus on patients and not just doctors. How do we make this very patient-centric, how can the experience at hospitals be better, how can the experience of treatment be better?” Dhruv Rastogi, senior VP and head of data science at third party administrator Medi Assist added. 

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Healthtech has seen a shift from more detection-based focus to predictive with the integration of AI, according to Dr. Gurukiran Babu Tumma, a physician and head of clinical services at Jivi AI, which develops AI products like a health assistant for patients. “Now I can consider multiple parameters–I can take the speech of the patient, the vision of the patient, and I also can take the lab data, and come up with a more predictive kind of analysis,” he said. 

The rise of digital health

According to research by BCG and B Capital, India’s digital healthcare industry, valued at $2.7 billion in 2022, could expand over tenfold to reach about $37 billion by 2030. 

A large impetus has been the government’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM). The initiative was launched in September 2021 with the aim of creating a national digital health ecosystem, which could support universal health coverage, and provide a framework for integrated digital health infrastructure in the country. 

According to the Economic Survey 2024-25, it has facilitated the creation of 728 million ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts), which allow users to share and access medical records, 477 million health records linked, and 551,000 healthcare professionals onboarded. 

AI in healthcare is not an entirely new phenomenon. While artificial intelligence and machine learning have been used for specific tasks, such as diagnostics or report analysis, the recent evolution has expanded its utility to become a more general-purpose infrastructure for healthcare applications, Lal pointed out. 

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The focus is shifting from limited applications to broader, integrated solutions that enhance patient care and administrative efficiency.

For instance, Rastogi pointed out that Medi Assist has been focusing on leveraging AI to reduce discharge times, and curb fraud. “There is a lot of potential in predicting bills and figuring out what could be the out-of-pocket [payments], so you are able to instantly get discharged…we at Medi Assist have been running thousands and thousands of discharges every month based on this technology,” he said.

What is the future of AI in health

The potential applications of AI in healthcare are vast, and Dr. Gurukiran further broke it down into three phases. 

Administrative use-cases like early discharges, insurance, automated doctor-patient conversations, or augmenting decision making by precise diagnostics, will be the first to be applied in the near future. 

In the mid-term, actual health-interventions like predicting ailments and transforming lifestyle in a curated manner will be applied. “These would take longer, because you need to build some sort of data on that and show results to the patients…that would take 5-10 years,” he said. 

In the next 10 years and more, he said, AI could be applied for longevity research, preventive healthcare, and personalized medicine to enhance overall health outcomes. 

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The ultimate priority for patients is improved health outcomes, Practo’s Lal noted. If AI can enhance diagnostic accuracy, treatment effectiveness, and patient recovery rates, it will become an indispensable tool in healthcare. 

Practo, through its teleconsultation offerings, has been increasing their focus on outcomes. “We have been able to push a lot of softer cues to the doctor…the research shows that a lot of the effectiveness of treatment, keeping the surgical [aspect] aside, actually depends on the quality, empathy, and how well understood the patient felt,” Lal said. 

“That actually determines in a large way the adherence to the treatment plan that has been created…those are cues we have been able to provide to our doctors in real time as consultation is happening in many cases,” he said.