The meeting witnessed some very eminent and influential speakers from around the healthcare sector. The former Enforcement Director (ED) Karnal Singh who has investigated many high- profile cases graced the meeting as the Chief Guest.

Innovation is exciting and there are more innovations happening in the private sector, and with increasing technology come increased risks. With the rapidly growing technology, ranging from wireless devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops to smart refrigerators, cars, and even medical devices like pacemakers, etc., it seems that the growing connections around us are difficult to detect. Therefore, the risk that comes together in operating within this brave, new and a connected world is high.

Shri Karnal Singh shared his expert viewpoint on the impact and importance of artificial intelligence, connected healthcare and need for cybersecurity in healthcare. How the digitization of healthcare is important and the rural and urban divide of same. He also insisted on the improvement of infrastructure and facilities available in the rural healthcare industry. In addition, he discussed the gap between the medical industry and government institutions where the research is needed and that we adopt mostly from our partnering and supporting foreign countries and how a change in mindset and adoption of new and improved technology can enhance the Indian healthcare. The future of healthcare is on the Internet and the Internet is vulnerable. Technology is the solution and it will come whether we want it or not. Therefore, the need of the hour is OUR PREPAREDNESS. We should welcome and be prepared for the connected network of healthcare.

An interesting session on the basic concepts of AI was the icing on the cake. It acquainted the participants with AI emphasizing on the fact that one should not get bogged down by the technology. Instead, one should focus on the use cases of it and there lies the innovation.

Often, the terms “digital health” evoke images of smartwatches or apps that can process the health data and can give a readout of parameters like heart rate, blood pressure, etc. That is a part of digital health, to be sure, but today we also focus on a newer aspect called “Precision Health” and the session “Prerequisite and journey of India to offer (precision) healthcare to all: Powered by Digital, Genetics, and AI” offered a far more expansive vision for digital health technologies, genetics and AI.

Precision medicine is an emerging approach of medicine which focuses on the cause of an illness, and not addressing the symptoms alone. Precision medicine may not be very well- known as Personalized Medicine. But they are the same. It takes into consideration individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.

Precision healthcare improves efficiency and accuracy to healthcare treatments. With precision healthcare, doctors can potentially develop targeted and precise treatment and therapies for masses as well as for an individual. This can improve patient treatment to large populations in countries like ours.

It’s based on evidence and data which comes from a series of medical tests on a patient. Thus, the data is its most important aspect. Very soon, along with genome sequencing and health sensors data coupled with the growing amount of Big Data, patient data will create large data sets of valuable information which can be used for more tailored treatments. But as an individual, a physician is not equipped to manually analyze these newly available data sets, which is where the advanced technologies such as AI come into picture.

The challenge that the clinicians see in the adoption of AI is the gap between the technical person and a clinician in regard to understanding the implementation of “normal reference values”. For example: If the normal value of hemoglobin for a person staying at planes (say Delhi NCR) is 13.5, the value 17.5 is perfectly normal at Ladakh. Is that incorporated in the AI system? Something that works in the USA might not work in India. The doctor or a clinician will have a great role to play in case of developing the AI as he/she can only give the correct inputs for the training sets.

With the new wave of digitization, medical records have seen a paradigm shift in the healthcare industry. As a result, the healthcare industry is witnessing an increase in the absolute volume of data in terms of complexity, diversity, and timeliness. Since the healthcare experts look for every possible way to lower the costs while improving the care process, delivery and management, and so is the aim of InnovatioCuris (IC), big data emerges as a persuasive solution with a promise to transform the healthcare industry. This paradigm shift from reactive to proactive healthcare may result in an overall reduction in healthcare costs and gradually may lead to economic growth. The above-stated and many more discussion points were there that became the part of the very interactive and interesting second session on “Mitigating data security and privacy challenges for digital healthcare in India”.

Data transmission is also an important aspect of implementing technology and safeguarding it. The Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act (DISHA) is one such step taken by the Indian Government in the long journey to securing the healthcare data of patients in India.

One of the biggest challenges is the lack of availability of data in a democratic manner and it’s all in silos in short data interoperability is a huge challenge. The major concerns that the clinicians have at the moment regarding the implementation of DISHA act are that it says that no court shall entertain any complaint unless made by the Central Government or central data authority, state data authority or the person affected and there would be times when PIL (public interest litigation) is there on the data security as well. The challenges will always pertain but what we need to do is to have trust in the law and protection by it. Major challenges regarding data security or cybersecurity, in hospitals or the clinical establishments, is that we do not have implemented laws that may protect our data. With the hope that they are definitely going to come, we can only stay prepared with our changed mindsets.

Last year May 24-26, 2017 was big startup event Latitude 59 in Tallinn,Estonia. I attended the event and got a flavor of the startup scene and healthcare sector discussions were held. I aligned my visit to Estonia along with the visit of my meeting with CBHEALTHACCESS delegates, innovative healthcare companies from Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia.

I could witness many startups and meet some friends. At any point in the premises of the conference there were over 1000 people and all engaged about future trends and opportunities. One way to know future is always by observing what problems best startups are engaged in solving. I could witness many biotech (genetics) based startup trying their hands on personalized medicine and new age diagnostics platform. Also, interesting was the cyber security companies.

One cyber security startup from Switzerland, OneVisage, that attracted my attention was working on 3D face scanning as authentication mechanism and looked promising for applications like online banking with your own face as your password. Estonia in general has made great advances in two areas, one that of e-governance including e-health and the other cyber security. Hence, it was no surprise for me to see both kind of startups flocking in conference and building upon the existing good work happening in that country. The other exciting thing to see was the countries collaborating and there were many international visitors including from India. Japanese and Finnish presence was quite visible.

There was also heavy promotion of e-residency program with some exciting announcements about easier account opening with a Finnish provider. It lured me also to try my hands on registering a company and post conference it took me only few minutes with the help of some local friends to register a company! Although, I am yet to make it fully functional, but that was already something for me.

The highlight for me was the healthcare session on the second day, which had a keynote by Nicky Hekster from IBM Watson. Nicky started by asking everyone in the room to standup and asked first those who have been to a hospital in last six months to sit down or someone in their close family. Next, he asked if they knew someone in friends/relatives who have been to the hospital. To my surprise there were only 2-3 people standing in the room  which had over hundreds of people. This was a master tactic to drive the point home, that healthcare matters to all.

Followed by the keynote was a panel discussion, which comprised of panelists from USA, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Estonia. They were healthcare practitioners, investors, incubators, startups and large company representatives. The session was interesting and demonstrated that how international best practices sharing and collaboration is need of the hour cutting across all type of stakeholders. I really enjoyed my two days not just in the conference but also in after parties with loads of intellectual discussions. Look forward being there again next year!

Want to write for InnoHEALTH? send us your article at  magazine@innovatiocuris.com

Read all the issues of InnoHEALTH magazine:
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 1 (July to September 2016) – https://goo.gl/iWAwN2 
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 2 (October to December 2016) – https://goo.gl/4GGMJz 
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 2 (April to June 2017) – https://goo.gl/Nv3eev
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 4 (October to December 2017) – http://amzn.to/2B2UMLw

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