Physicians getting equipped with digital tools

Data and AI solutions will play a huge role and provide actionable insights that enable public health and government officials to make informed policy decisions, feels George Thangadurai, Chief Executive Officer of HEAL Software Inc.

Now that we are in the post-Covid age, what are the tech trends that have become permanent and are there things that may return to the old normal?

• Technology will reshape every industry and human experiences. The axiom that every business will materialize, most transactions will be online fuelled by the rise of online ecommerce and banking.

• There will be a plethora of enterprises adopting AI/ML to reduce operational costs and improve process efficiencies.

• Digital Productivity Gains accelerate the fourth industrial revolution with game-changing technologies and entrepreneurs mushrooming from the crisis.

• Travel industry will bounce back with a vengeance.

• People will get back to addressing elective healthcare issues they put on the back burner while waiting out the Covid pandemic and the associated risks.

• Hybrid work environments would apply to not only tech industry workers, but also in industries such as healthcare.

What specific changes and tech upgrades are we seeing as a result of the Covid crisis in the healthcare industry?

Healthcare is going digital with rapid growth in digitally-driven services. Remote and telemedicine have started to become ubiquitous for a plethora of healthcare issues and will continue to play a bigger role. Data and AI solutions will play a huge role and provide actionable insights that enable public health and government officials to make informed policy decisions, define budgetary requirements, determine the requisite resources, and help avoid supply disruption. Everything from digital or contactless check-ins to personalized healthcare have taken on prominent roles. Physicians are getting equipped with digital tools. All these results in patients expecting impeccable and unfettered access and service levels and healthcare providers having to meet these growing demands on their applications and IT infrastructure postures.

What about advances in Artificial Intelligence? Can you speak something about the importance of AIOps, especially with reference to its potential in India?

With tighter budgets and an ever greater need to have 24/7/365 availability ITOps leadership will embrace automation and AI. Outages have become more expensive than ever and solutions that can prevent incidents as opposed to after the fact remediation are the need of the hour. There is an explosion in industries going digital and especially in transaction heavy industries like banking, ecommerce, retail and technology AIOps will play a huge role.

What are the ethical and regulatory issues with regard to using AI algorithms in the medical industry, both in India and abroad?

Data privacy and sharing remains one of the key tenets that cannot be broken without incurring a serious reputational loss. Regulators and the healthcare industry has to walk the fine line balancing convenience and privacy. The use of AI in healthcare is no doubt a productive endeavour. Especially with the uneven ratio of skilled doctors to patients, quality healthcare concentrated in the hands of a few conglomerates the healthcare industry must be ripe for disruption. If you think about it, AI in healthcare can be classified into predictive, prescriptive and descriptive.

Descriptive AI is by far the most simple and commonly used and has been more effective than even humans. However, for predictive and preventive healthcare AI, there should be a coordinated effort by both the governments and the industry to come up with a central repository of sorts for collecting accurate and rich data. Only with rich data for AI models to train on, the predictions will be accurate (for example, an AI determining who a doctor should operate based on their chances of survival) and speeding disease screening and diagnosis. The uplifting news is most startup investments and government focus is on healthcare startups that are using AI to bring healthcare to sections of the society who couldn’t afford it for a fraction of cost and also increase the productivity of the industry by automating mundane tasks that don't require human judgement.

What about the importance of ITOps in terms of coming out with innovative solutions?

ITOps is the backbone of any digital company. Today digital transformation has forced companies to adapt to the new norm and embrace change. Disruptive ITOps technologies are the need of the hour and ITOps/AIOps is at the forefront facilitating the push to online, ensuring 100% availability. From observability to monitoring to predicting anomalies to preventive-healing, ITOps plays a significant role thanks to advances in AI/ML models and algorithms and the availability of relevant training datasets.