By Dr. CJ Meadows, Professor and Head of Innovation-Asia – S P Jain School of Global Management | Chairman – The Tiger Center
“AI is going to very rapidly transform medicine… this will impact you as well as positively impacting billions of lives.”
― Ray Kurzweil, Inventor, Author, and Futurist
It’s time.
Over half of humanity — 4.5 billion people – do not have full, essential healthcare. Over 400 million can’t access basic healthcare.
And yet, more people have access to a mobile phone than clean water – and have for over a decade.
In fact, smartphone use totals 4.7 – 5 billion (much of which is AI-enabled or -driven), 6 billion can access the internet, and 5.5 billion could access GenAI if they chose (adoption is growing).
So, potential access to GenAI (5.5 billion) is nearing parity with access to clean water (6.1 billion).
Shocking.
Weirdly, we haven’t fully connected AI and accessible, affordable healthcare.
Yet.
Why?
I’ve been wondering just that as someone who’s lived a decades-long career building and using advanced technologies; teaching executives and MBAs about innovation and transformation; as well as chairing a not-for-profit corporation in central India working with some of the world’s poorest communities.
At The Tiger Center, our communities face 75% unemployment and – when employed – earn USD 2/day. Their nearest access to healthcare is over 60 km (37 mi) away. So, we partnered with Tilda Medical Hospital and host their doctors, nurses, and aides in medical camps, attracting thousands of patients and their families.
Since part of my academic job is writing and speaking, I decided to write something I can use to enrich our camps with technology, as well as giving a published voice to healthcare professionals building the future from inside corporates, not-for-profits, accelerators, and startups.
These authors work across the globe for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Becton Dickinson (BD), IDC, Sunasi.AI, Jeiva International, ImmunoHeal Personalised Medicine, 149 Technologies, Meridional Health, and (of course!) SPJ Global and The Tiger Center.
Technology, new designs, and business innovations have made a genuine impact. Embrace, which provides an innovatively-designed, portable incubator costing USD 200 (vs. a standard USD 20,000 incubator) has saved over 1.5million babies.
Aravind Eye Care provides affordable care for up to 6 million patients a year, including 700,000 eye surgeries — 50 – 60% of which are largely or completely funded by revenues from paying patients. Beyond technology, this is done through business model innovation; productivity enhancements; low-cost, in-house manufacturing; high volume; and rural facilities that focus on prevention and early treatment, requiring no long-distance travel to expensive cities.
Peek Vision originally made its name with a 3-D-printed device that clipped over a smartphone’s camera and flash, enabling health care workers in remote regions to “peek” inside a patient’s eye and capture high-quality images, identifying patients with cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. They’ve screened over 20 million people and connected nearly 2 million to much-needed eye-treatment facilities.
However, they found – like so many others – that technology alone isn’t the problem. Their primary bottleneck was the missing software infrastructure needed to track patients, manage health data, and ensure patients actually received the care they needed. Today, they function primarily as a software and data intelligence platform, and their app Peek Acuity enables accurate eye-chart testing without extra hardware — plus tracking software that NGOs and governments use to optimize public health referral systems.
That said, one of my chapter authors who’s been introducing new healthcare systems across Africa found that even digital healthcare systems won’t help when stakeholders have no incentives to change. The comfortable status-quo hurts patients (not themselves), and patients are not in a position to lead change.
Additional insights and recommendations for today’s healthcare leaders come from the rest, including the following sample:
- Lead the ecosystem (or take part) and track the entire patient journey. Healthcare is delivered by multiple entities in an ecosystem, and when no one tracks the entire patient journey, patients die. This author’s mother did. The problem wasn’t negligence. It was the fact that no one was responsible for the patient’s entire health journey, and no one managed the ecosystem.
“Technology can and should play a fundamental role in democratizing access to high-quality healthcare. But one company can’t make this a reality alone.”
― Dr. Greg Corrado, Head of Health AI, Google
- Prepare your stakeholder maps of who gets and gives what in the ecosystem and prepare to lead or at least draw the players into a healthcare leadership organization from which they can make change. Fragmented, global payment systems faced a range of dangers, and the 5 biggest organizations founded PCI Security Standards Council, facilitating growth in digital payments. Do you have to be in a big global organization to make a difference? No, just map and manage whatever ecosystem you’re in.
- Don’t scale indiscriminately — use AI to identify what to invest in. Sunasi.AI’s platform visualizes key capabilities and informs governments, investors, and companies which locations are ready for healthcare system investments, plus – where they’re not ready – what investments to make first. Programs succeed better, investments yield higher returns, and patient outcomes rise where contexts are conducive.
- Build on corporate innovation (which usually chases developed markets) or start fresh for breakthroughs in last-mile medicine. Doctors Without Borders regularly has to re-innovate for the last mile, and their results may actually create more value (when shared with others), because the “base of the pyramid” is the world’s biggest market.
- Partner when your own context gets in the way of innovation. One of the corporate authors innovates best in-context but struggles with protectionist regulations. Short of lobbying regulators to foster innovation instead of blocking it, you may need to innovate with partners globally.
- That said, there are startups – some of whom engage in “open innovation” with big corporates for global reach – that could already be offering focused solutions you need. Use AI to help find them – and their accelerator and ecosystem contacts — and to navigate regulatory, legal, ethical, security, governance, and other hurdles. We see startups surmounting these hurdles every day.
- Engage in Human-Centered Innovation (Design Thinking), placing patients and their entire journey at the core of your initiatives. Research shows that if you have an innovation dollar to spend on a complex, human problem with little or no data, you’ll get the highest return with DT. Design the whole journey and return patients to a better life, not just better stats.
- Adopt a disruptive mindset. Just solve the problems. If it doesn’t help organizations make money in the way they’re already structured, spin it out. If it does, work the ecosystem for adoption.
Technologies are accessible. Systems are changeable. Ecosystems are manageable.
The time is now.
“We’re not preparing for an AI revolution in healthcare. We’re living it right now.”
― Reza Hosseini Ghomi, MD, MSE, CEO, Medflow
on the FDA approving 873 AI healthcare algorithms in 2025
To find out more, visit https://www.drcjmeadows.com/ai-medtech. To talk to the author’s digital twin about your situation, visit CJ2.personal.ai. To find out more about The Tiger Center, see www.tigercenter.org.
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