FICCI on Saturday launched its Telangana Healthcare Panel and a conference on AI in healthcare, alongside the release of a book examining what artificial intelligence can and cannot do in the medical field. The event signals an industry push to turn policy recommendations into practical changes for health systems in India, including for professionals working in hospitals, clinics, and public health across the country.
New state-level panel aims at policy recommendations
Announcing the launch of the Telangana Healthcare panel, Ms. Deepti Sai Prasad, Chair of the panel and Managing Director of Ozone Hospitals, outlined its early priorities: AI-enabled care, preventive and outcomes-based healthcare, medical tourism, healthcare accessibility, and education and skilling for the workforce. The panel said it would work to shape policy recommendations for the Telangana government in those areas.
Dr. Chinna Babu, Co-Chair of the panel and Clinical Director of Surgical Oncology at Yashoda Hospitals, spoke about extending preventive healthcare and accessible services beyond Hyderabad into tier-2 and tier-3 cities. He said weak healthcare infrastructure in smaller towns pushes up out-of-pocket expenditure for patients who lack local access to care.
AI's four transformations for healthcare
Dr. Arun Kumar Tiwari, a missile scientist and author who worked closely with Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, outlined four shifts AI would bring to healthcare. These include moves from late diagnosis to early prediction, from one-size-fits-all treatment to personalized care, from concentrated medical expertise to wider public access, and from fragmented records to a connected system such as the Ayushman Bharat Health Account.
Dr. Mona Duggal, Director of the ICMR-National Institute for Research in Digital Health, called for a shift from health records to wellness records. She argued that a proactive, wellness-first approach should feed into clinical health records rather than the other way around. She pointed to three life stages-early childhood, the college years, and the workplace-where India's healthcare system currently under-invests, and noted that most public health research still focuses on rural and elderly populations rather than the working-age majority.
Digital health must follow the patient, not institutions
On a panel about building digital health ecosystems, Dr. Avinash Pandey, Group Leader of NABH Digital Health, said India's healthcare organizations have invested heavily in digital systems over the past decade, but technology adoption alone has not translated into transformation. "Hospitals with sophisticated systems still saw clinicians relying on paper records, and dashboards built for leadership often went unused," he said. "Digital health in the country remained organised around institutions rather than patients, creating digital islands of fragmented information."
Pandey argued that interoperability is fundamentally a clinical problem, not a technical one. "The design principle is to follow the patient," he said, citing NABH data showing hospitals accredited to its digital health standards recorded an average 30 percent reduction in patient waiting times.
Practical workshops and workforce skills
The conference included sessions on healthcare workforce skills in the digital health and AI era, exploring evolving requirements for professionals. Another session on AI in clinical care and diagnostics examined real-world use cases in radiology, pathology, and predictive analysis, addressing challenges in adoption and integration. A workshop covered AI and healthtech innovation opportunities for startups and providers.
In his special address, Satya Sai Prasad B V, Chairman of Ozone Hospitals, cautioned against private equity dictating terms to doctors, arguing that hospital management should remain patient- and doctor-centric. "Health is wealth. A healthy person contributes to their family, society and the nation, while sickness becomes a burden on all of them," he said, calling on government to treat healthcare spending as an investment in growth.
Why this matters for healthcare professionals
For clinicians, administrators, and tech leads working in Indian hospitals and clinics, the conference signals that infrastructure changes and policy shifts from this panel will likely influence state-level mandates. The shift to wellness-first records-with an emphasis on early childhood, college, and workplace health-means professionals may need to adapt workflows to keep up with new standards under the Ayushman Bharat Health Account. The focus also underscores the need for ongoing upskilling in AI tools. For those looking to build relevant competencies, courses and resources about AI for Healthcare remain relevant as workforce requirements evolve in this space.
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