|
India’s healthcare sector has made real progress in digitising records, expanding telemedicine, and connecting patients to care. The next leap will not come from storing more data, but it will come from using that data in a way that actively helps clinicians make better decisions, faster, and with less administrative load.
According to Rama Krishna Sreepada, co-founder and chief architect, [x]cube LABS, digital health infrastructure is now large enough. Government updates show how quickly this ecosystem is growing. As of 12th December, 2025, Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission reported 83.94 crore ABHA accounts created and 79.71 crore health records linked. This is a huge base of longitudinal health information. It is also a new burden if doctors are expected to manually read and interpret it in the middle of a busy OPD, he added.
Traditional electronic health records behave like storage rooms for documents and lab reports but rarely help a doctor reason through a case. A clinician still has to scan long histories, pick out what matters, connect symptoms to past conditions, check medication interactions, and decide next steps. Now Agentic clinical intelligence changes that. Instead of just showing data, a clinical reasoning agent can read the record, understand the context, and propose actions. Not in the form of generic advice, but as a structured clinical suggestion that a doctor can accept, modify, or reject, Sreepada told Pharmabiz.
The biggest reason India needs agentic workflows is not only volume. It is the nature of the data. Clinical information is unstructured with handwritten notes, discharge summaries in different formats. Prescriptions in shorthand, patient descriptions that mix languages. Family histories shared in conversation and captured loosely.
When records are linked at scale, reading them manually becomes unrealistic. Agentic systems are designed for this exact gap and present it in a clean clinical summary so that the doctor can focus on treatment and diagnosis rather than paperwork, said Sreepada.
A single agent can be useful, but healthcare decisions are rarely one-dimensional. This is why the more powerful approach is multi-agent orchestration. One agent focused on radiology analysis that flags abnormal findings. Another agent focused on patient history can summarise comorbidities, medications, allergies, and recent events. Another agent focused on lab trends. A supervisory agent can check for contradictions, missing data, and gaps that need clarification, he noted.
India’s healthcare challenge is also geographic. Clinical intelligence must work not only inside tertiary hospitals but also closer to where people live. Primary health centres and community facilities need decision support that works with limited staff.
Privacy and governance are equally critical. Training systems on diverse hospital data without moving sensitive records across institutional borders can improve performance while reducing privacy risk. Human-in-the-loop checkpoints remain essential too. Clinical accountability must stay with clinicians. Agentic systems should assist, not overrule, said Sreepada.
Even integration across systems of care will improve when allopathy data and traditional wellness practices can be represented in a unified knowledge graph. India has built the digital rails. ABHA and linked records have created the base. The next leap is to move from storing healthcare data to using it intelligently, safely, and transparently. That is what will define India’s agentic clinical era, said Sreepada.
|