New Delhi

Emphasising that India’s approach to artificial intelligence in healthcare is rooted in inclusivity, Minister of State for Health Anupriya Patel on Tuesday said AI must be judged not by the sophistication of its algorithms alone, but by how deeply it touches lives and reduces health inequities across the country.

Addressing a session titled ‘Innovation to Impact: AI as a Public Health Game-Changer’ at the India AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam, Patel said, “AI for India, as our Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisions, is not merely Artificial Intelligence but All-Inclusive Intelligence.”

She said that as India moves towards the goal of Viksit Bharat by 2047, health remains one of the most critical pillars of development. India’s vast and diverse population, the rural-urban divide, and the dual burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases pose unique challenges, making technology—particularly AI—an indispensable enabler, she noted.

Patel highlighted that AI has been integrated across the entire continuum of healthcare, from disease surveillance and prevention to diagnosis and treatment. She cited the Media Disease Surveillance System, an AI-enabled platform that tracks disease trends in 13 languages and generates real-time alerts, strengthening India’s outbreak preparedness and disease control efforts.

Under the One Health Mission, she said, the Indian Council of Medical Research has launched AI-based tools for genomic surveillance that can predict potential zoonotic outbreaks even before transmission from animals to humans occurs, marking a paradigm shift in preventive public health.

The minister also pointed to the deployment of AI-enabled handheld X-ray machines and computer-aided detection tools for tuberculosis (CA-TB), which have brought advanced diagnostics closer to communities. These interventions, she said, have led to around 16 per cent additional TB case detection, while AI-based tools predicting adverse treatment outcomes have contributed to a 27 per cent decline in negative TB treatment results.

Stressing the importance of scalability and affordability, Patel said that in a resource-constrained setting like India, solutions must be frugal, scalable and capable of addressing systemic gaps. She noted that the government has worked towards building a robust AI ecosystem in healthcare, including the establishment of three Centres of Excellence for AI at AIIMS Delhi, PGIMER Chandigarh, and AIIMS Rishikesh.

Clarifying the role of technology, Patel asserted that AI is meant to augment, not replace, clinicians. By easing the burden of routine and high-intensity tasks, AI allows doctors to focus more on complex cases and critical decision-making.

“Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art,” she said, adding that empathy, compassion and human touch—core to healthcare—cannot be replicated by machines and will always remain the domain of clinicians.

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Highlighting the need for future-ready professionals, Patel said healthcare workers must be AI-literate. She noted that the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences has recently launched an online training programme on AI in healthcare to equip doctors with essential digital competencies, ensuring that India’s medical workforce is prepared for a technology-driven future.