By Kaushal Verma
New Delhi [India], February 17 : India's vast healthcare data and Singapore's advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are opening new avenues for collaboration that could accelerate innovation and make healthcare technologies more affordable and globally competitive, Karen Priyadarshini, Vice President and Head of Healthcare - Asia at AWS (Amazon Web Services Singapore Pvt Ltd) toldtoday.
"Singapore is a small country with a very big AI push, and they have the models that they are building, but they need data to train those models and that's where India comes in," Priyadarshini toldin an interview on the sidelines of the "Democratizing AI Resources for Economic Growth and Social Good" event at the India AI Impact Summit.
"India has a population of 1.4 billion, and that means that many data points that you have. And I think that scale nobody on planet Earth has," she said.
Priyadarshini said discussions at the summit and at the AWS Public Sector Summit earlier in the day focused on how technology can help India scale healthcare delivery affordably and enable startups to expand globally. "India is a bed of startups, so how do we enable them to really go global? How can we scale with these technologies? How can we make it affordable?" she said.
She highlighted the potential for research partnerships, particularly in rare diseases. Referring to remarks by the Chief Executive Officer of the National Health Authority (NHA), she said India's expanding health data ecosystem could be opened to researchers worldwide.
"We're going to have the scale of data what are we going to do with it? We're going to invite researchers," she said, noting that certain rare disease data sets are difficult to assemble outside India.
Priyadarshini described AI as a "technology leveler" in healthcare. "It's not that the U.S. is ahead, it's not that China is ahead. We have amazing startups in India because of the scale of population," she said, adding that markets such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea are also developing strong solutions.
She said hyperscalers such as AWS can help regional innovators scale securely and responsibly. "AI has lots of bandwidth, and it comes with a package of risk as well," she said, stressing the need for safeguards as adoption accelerates.
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