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Healthcare professionals are increasingly capitalising artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance patient care, improve clinical decision-making, and streamline workflows. From assisting with diagnostics and treatment planning to automating administrative tasks, AI enables clinicians to deliver timelier, accurate, and personalized care. By reducing operational burdens and providing data-driven insights, AI is helping healthcare teams address growing patient demands while improving outcomes and overall healthcare efficiency.
According to Dr. Bharat Mody, Chairman and Chief Orthopaedic Surgeon, Welcare Hospital, AI can empower medical professionals and strengthen healthcare delivery. Healthcare systems globally continue to face issues like rising operational costs, staffing shortages, increasing documentation requirements, and workflow inefficiencies. Here, AI can help optimise operating theatre utilisation, predict patient admissions, streamline billing processes, improve inventory management, and identify patients at risk of deterioration before serious complications arise, giving time to doctors what they do the best - solving the cases.
From analysing lab investigations to summarising emerging medical literature and assisting with patient communication documents, AI streamlines tasks that traditionally consumed significant administrative and cognitive effort. Therefore, we can say AI has improved decision-making and reducing routine workload for doctors, he added.
Yet, with all these advantages, AI cannot be positioned as a substitute for human expertise. Monitoring devices, telemedicine and remote analytics are making healthcare
accessible beyond hospital walls, reaching to the interior parts, which is transformative in developing countries including India, where access to complete care remains uneven between urban and rural regions, he said.
Also, healthcare is about people and not algorithms. Issues surrounding patient privacy, cybersecurity, algorithmic bias, transparency, and medico-legal accountability must be addressed through robust governance frameworks and here AI should remain a tool that augments human decision-making rather than one that replaces or operates independently of clinical oversight, said Dr Mody.
Having spent nearly four decades in medicine, Dr. Mody is convinced that human intervention, bringing in empathy, trust, ethical judgment, and the nuanced art of clinical reasoning cannot be digitised. While technology can enhance efficiency and support decision-making, patients would always continue to seek reassurance, compassion, confidence & emotional support from the doctors treating them. The question is not whether the future of healthcare will be defined by AI replacing doctors. Instead, we need to ensure how AI will be shaped effectively by doctors,
hospitals, adopting AI responsibly to deliver safer, smarter, and more efficient care, he said.
Additionally, the pharmaceutical sector is too expected to witness profound transformations through AI adoption. Currently, the drug discovery done through traditional means requires enormous investments of time and capital, often stretching the research through years. AI-driven analysis of biological data can accelerate the identification of promising molecular targets, predict drug responses, and optimise clinical trial design, optimally reducing development timelines and making innovative therapies more affordable, Dr Mody told Pharmabiz in an email.
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