2024 Health IT Trends in India: Expanded AI Applications in Healthcare

Over the past year, India has been working to build the foundations of its digital health ecosystem Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. This has provided healthcare institutions, research organizations and even small practices and individual consumers with a springboard to catch up with the rest of the world in testing new technologies.

Health IT developers have steset up to support India’s need for digitalisation of healthcare. Rustom Lawyer, founder of India-based Augnito, developer of voice AI for clinical documentation, spoke to Healthcare IT news about where the country’s IT landscape could go this new year.

Continuing this year, the following is what he sees areas of momentum:

• AI-powered diagnostics and clinical decision support

• Telemedicine and remote patient monitoring

• Data privacy and security

Meanwhile, the following emerging trendshe says, may see greater uptake and activity in 2024:

• Personalized medicine and AI-driven clinical trials

• Wearables and assistive technologies

• Mental health care and AI-powered support

Interestingly enough, Lawyer points out, AI technology can connect all these trends. For example, there is AI to streamline clinical documentation, allowing for faster, more accurate diagnoses. AI can also improve the transcription and analysis of doctor-patient conversations in telemedicine. Furthermore, it enables digital assistive applications that help patients access healthcare services independently.

Embrace digital

The Indian government continues to drive greater adoption of digital health across the healthcare ecosystem, largely through the ABDM. The program, which aims to connect the various stakeholders of the healthcare system, has so far helped create health IDs for more than 500 million individuals and linked more than 300 million medical records to approximately 200,000 registered healthcare institutions . The government has played a major role in encouraging the Indian people to get their health IDs created incentives for healthcare providers. Even private and small clinics across the country are involved in the program to help them digitize.

As access to healthcare becomes closer and more efficient for consumers post-pandemic, this could drive the Indian digital healthcare market grow to $37 billion in value by 2030, compared to just $2.7 billion in 2022.

Another factor also driving healthcare technology adoption, especially among hospitals, is the promise of significant cost savings, Advocaat notes.

“Take it from the Apollo Hospitals,” he says. After their partnership to integrate voice AI into the clinical documentation workflow, the major hospital group was able to realize a 21x return on investment, save an average of 44 hours per month for their physicians, and achieve a 46% increase in overall productivity. ”

“By streamlining workflows and improving efficiencies, AI-powered solutions can deliver significant cost savings for hospitals, making them more receptive to adoption.”

Voice AI, anyone?

In the coming years, there may be a growing focus on voice biomarkers for the early detection of diseases.

“By utilizing more than 2,500 biomarkers present in the sublanguage elements of the human voice alone, we will soon be able to identify neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, mental health diseases such as depression and lung diseases such as COVID-19, simply by hearing the patient talk,” explains the lawyer.

The way voice AI works is that it scans for vocal patterns in a patient’s speech which are stored and collected in a database of linguistic intonations, inflections, cadence and others. This, according to Lawyer, could deliver “unparalleled efficiency, cost and reach benefits” for India, where the patient-to-physician ratio is high and 70% of all healthcare infrastructure is confined to metropolitan cities.

“Overall, I believe 2024 will be a pivotal year for health technology in India.”