Hyd: FICCI Telangana Launches Healthcare Panel, Holds Conference on AI-Enabled Healthcare
Hyderabad, Aug 8 (TNT): The FICCI Telangana State Council on Saturday launched its Healthcare Panel and organised a conference on “AI-Enabled Healthcare & Digital Transformation”, with experts calling for greater use of Artificial Intelligence, digital technologies and preventive healthcare to build accessible and patient-centric health systems.
The conference was themed “Building the Future of Healthcare: From Diagnosis to Digital Health Ecosystems.”
The inaugural session also saw the release of “Health Data and Power: What AI Can Do and Cannot Do,” examining the capabilities and limitations of AI in healthcare.
The conference brought together healthcare leaders, clinicians, researchers and policy experts to deliberate on AI-enabled care, preventive and outcomes-based healthcare, medical tourism, healthcare accessibility and skilling of the healthcare workforce.
The newly launched Healthcare Panel will work on healthcare-related policy recommendations for the Telangana government, with its initial priorities including AI-enabled care, preventive and outcomes-based healthcare, medical tourism, healthcare accessibility, education and workforce skilling.
Deepti Sai Prasad, Chair, FICCI Telangana Healthcare Panel and Managing Director, Ozone Hospitals, said the panel would focus on these priority areas and work towards shaping policy recommendations for the state government.
Dr Chinna Babu, Co-Chair, FICCI Telangana Healthcare Panel and Clinical Director of Surgical Oncology, Yashoda Hospitals, stressed the need to extend preventive healthcare and accessible medical services beyond Hyderabad to tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
He said inadequate healthcare infrastructure in smaller towns was increasing the out-of-pocket expenditure of patients who had to travel to access medical services.
In his special address, Satya Sai Prasad B V, Chairman, Ozone Hospitals, highlighted India’s historical contribution to medicine and surgery and cautioned against private equity interests dictating terms to doctors. He said hospital management should remain patient- and doctor-centric.
He also called for healthcare spending to be viewed as an investment in the growth of the country rather than an expenditure.
Dr Arun Kumar Tiwari, Indian missile scientist and author who worked closely with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, outlined four transformations AI could bring to healthcare — from late diagnosis to early prediction, one-size-fits-all treatment to personalised care, concentrated medical expertise to wider access to health information, and fragmented records to connected systems such as the Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA).
Dr Mona Duggal, Director, ICMR-National Institute for Research in Digital Health, called for a shift from health records to wellness records, with a proactive, wellness-first approach feeding into clinical health records.
She identified early childhood, college years and the workplace as three stages where greater attention was needed and noted that public health research largely focused on rural and elderly populations rather than the working-age majority.
Speaking during a panel discussion on “Building Digital Health Ecosystems”, Dr Avinash Pandey, Group Leader, NABH Digital Health, said healthcare organisations had invested heavily in digital systems over the past decade but technology adoption alone had not resulted in transformation.
He said hospitals with sophisticated digital systems still had clinicians relying on paper records, while dashboards developed for leadership were often underutilised.
Digital health, he said, remained organised around institutions rather than patients, resulting in fragmented information.
Emphasising that “the design principle is to follow the patient,” Pandey said interoperability was fundamentally a clinical issue rather than merely a technical one.
He cited NABH data showing that hospitals accredited to its digital health standards had recorded an average 30 per cent reduction in patient waiting times.
The inaugural session concluded with a vote of thanks by Isha Sinha, Chief Legal & Compliance Officer, Medicover Hospitals.
The conference also featured discussions on “Healthcare Workforce Skills in Digital Health Tech & AI Era”, focusing on changing skill requirements for healthcare professionals amid the adoption of digital health, AI and emerging technologies.
A session on AI in clinical care and diagnostics examined the use of AI in radiology, pathology and predictive analysis, besides discussing real-world applications and challenges relating to adoption, accuracy and integration with existing healthcare systems.
A workshop on “AI & HealthTech Innovation – Opportunities for Startups and Providers” focused on practical aspects of implementing AI solutions in healthcare.
The conference reaffirmed FICCI’s commitment to facilitating industry dialogue, knowledge sharing and collaboration to accelerate digital health adoption and support the growth of India’s healthcare sector.
TNT TS
