India offers unlimited opportunities in medical devices manufacturing

Opportunities for the manufacturing of medical devices in India are ‘almost unlimited’, says Chaitanya Sarawate, president and CEO of GE HealthCare South Asia, looking at a future where the healthcare sector could generate millions of jobs each year and expand care access.

According to Sarawate, who is also managing director, Wipro GE Healthcare, new age technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are significantly improving care quality and access to care.

“… At GE HealthCare, we believe in the power of integrating the logic-driven world of software with the digital world of devices. We believe in solutions that are linked, responsive, and predictive,” Sarawate told PTI in an interview.

The company, he said, was able to enhance infrastructure scalability for both R&D and production using Amazon Web Services.

Excerpts from the interview:
Q: What are the growth opportunities before the medical devices industry?

A: Two significant changes are occurring in the overall healthcare industry in India – on the one hand, the pandemic has catalysed an incremental public and private investment in the healthcare infrastructure to enhance access to quality healthcare; on the other, Make in India initiatives have resulted in a radical shift in the way the Indian business ecosystem views the medical devices industry.

With the expansion of healthcare and government schemes such as PLI (production linked incentive), we are now witnessing more investments in manufacturing and component manufacturing. This, in turn, will help in improving access to quality healthcare in India and grow our export revenues.

We are looking at a future with the healthcare sector generating millions of jobs each year, increasing our foreign exchange earnings, and expanding care access.

In a country with about 70 per cent import dependence in medical devices industry, there is an almost unlimited opportunity to grow manufacturing of medical devices for the domestic market. This is translating into incremental investments in medical device manufacturing in India from global manufacturers.

While the domestic Indian market provides adequate opportunity, governmental schemes such as PLI are is also giving an impetus for manufacturers to add capacity to meet needs of hospitals and patients outside India through exports.

Q: How do you see the pace of adoption of digital innovations by healthcare institutions?

A: The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital models. The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) seeks to implement systems like unique health IDs, digi doctor (a repository of doctors), health facility register (a repository of health facilities), electronic medical records and more.

These align with our objective of making healthcare accessible to the farthest reaches of the country.

The key is that industry, academia, and the government are working towards the common goal of bringing these solutions to patients, integrating data with hospitals and private institutions, making digital healthcare seamless.

As these efforts mature, we will need to overcome several challenges, including regulatory and legal barriers, data privacy, and adequacy of digital/connectivity infrastructure and training for healthcare providers.

With systemic efforts, the digital adoption will improve and accelerate.

Q: How is GE HealthCare creating ecosystem value by collaborating and partnering with stakeholders – start-ups and academia?

A: According to reports, India could have one billion digital health users by 2030. India already has 400 million digital health users, using available services such as telehealth, home health, home testing, e-pharmacies, and other digitally powered offerings.

The GE HealthCare Edison Accelerator programme helps collaborate with startups to develop solutions that enable and promote a technology-backed healthcare ecosystem. Through this programme, we aim to nurture the start-up ecosystem, build strategic partnerships, and co-develop healthcare applications using AI and other technologies.

GE HealthCare launched the Healthcare Innovation Lab with IISc (Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science) to aid clinicians in tackling real-time difficulties in care delivery by bringing to market new digital solutions that can be incorporated on the Edison platform.

Q: How are artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, cloud, 5G, and other advanced technologies transforming healthcare infrastructure space?

A: The use of AI in medtech devices for diagnosis, actionable insights, and therapy is just one example of how outcomes can be improved by realising the potential of AI-led solutions.

AI is significantly improving care quality and access to care. Take, for instance, AIR Recon DL, which is a pioneering, deep learning-based reconstruction algorithm that improves SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and image sharpness, enabling shorter scan times.

It improves image quality at the foundational level by making use of the raw data to remove image noise and ringing.

Additionally, 5G infrastructure can significantly ease hospital adoption. While maintaining the highest standards of privacy and data security, 5G-based IoT (Internet of Things) and AI systems and devices will help consumers maintain good health by monitoring vital signs and identifying symptoms in time, reminding, and scheduling regular check-ups, reducing the stress of manually filing for claims, and ensuring data synchronisation between consumers, hospitals, and insurance companies.

The next generation 5G has the potential to disrupt the patient care continuum, transforming diagnosis, therapy, and prognosis. When we launched our 5G Innovation Lab in Bengaluru, the first for GE HealthCare across the globe, the idea was to make ground-breaking advances in patient care possible, including potentially bringing cutting-edge technology to rural and sub-urban regions.

At our 5G Innovation Lab, our lead scientists and technologists research and develop solutions for the most pressing healthcare issues. Moreover, it houses state-of-the-art infrastructure, including a private 5G network for testing and development.

Q: What are the new initiatives that have been initiated by GE HealthCare?

A: India is a dynamic market. We are among the first medtech companies to design and Make in India, for India and the world. We have reinstated our commitment to building the Make in India dream through multiple initiatives. Of the total sales of our products in India, around a third of manufacturing/assembly is being driven out of India.

We have over 30 products Made in India sold in more than 70 countries.

In March, Wipro GE Healthcare invested a little over Rs 1 billion (Rs 100 crore) in its fourth manufacturing facility under the Indian government’s production linked incentive (PLI) scheme.

Q: How have cloud technology and AWS enabled you in your operations?

A: At GE HealthCare, we believe in the power of integrating the logic-driven world of software with the digital world of devices. We believe in solutions that are linked, responsive, and predictive. AWS gave us the ability to do so – we were able to enhance infrastructure scalability for both R&D and production using AWS. To ease integration and scalability, the team also made sure that computing, storage, database, and network resources are readily available. All of this was completed maintaining the highest level of security.

One AWS service that has helped us in our journey is Amazon SageMaker. It has enabled our data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly and efficiently. By leveraging SageMaker, we’ve been able to develop advanced algorithms that improve patient outcomes and optimise our operations.

Furthermore, AWS has allowed us to adopt a microservices architecture, which has streamlined our software development process and increased our agility in responding to ever-changing market needs. Through the use of AWS container services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and AWS Fargate, we’ve been able to deploy, manage, and scale our containerized applications seamlessly, without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. Moneycontrol