Healthcare in India is standing at a fascinating crossroads. On one side are the glittering possibilities of AI-assisted diagnostics, cloud-based hospital systems and digital twins that predict treatment outcomes. On the other side are the persistent realities of overcrowded government hospitals, a shortage of beds and villages where primary health centres remain locked for months. So, what about the promise of future-ready healthcare?
The EY-Parthenon–CII HealthTech Survey 2025 captures this duality well. It notes that India’s healthcare providers are investing heavily in connected platforms, real-time insights and cybersecurity to transform the way care is delivered. The report also acknowledges the gaps like outdated infrastructure, fragmented data and shortage of skilled IT professionals.
To be truly future-ready, India’s healthcare has to do more than digitise hospitals. It has to create a connected ecosystem that brings tertiary hospitals and rural health vans into the same digital conversation. That is where both large-scale policy frameworks and grassroots innovations become crucial.
The 5S Framework for Future-Ready Healthcare
The survey lays out a 5S framework for future-ready hospitals:
- Scalable infrastructure – IT systems that connect HIS, ERP, CRM and EMRs.
- Seamless engagement – patient portals, teleconsultations, mobile apps.
- Strategic data use – unified platforms for timely, actionable insights.
- Sustainability & compliance – cybersecurity, privacy, environmentally conscious operations.
- Smart AI & automation – decision support, predictive analytics and operational efficiency.
This framework is visionary but it is also hospital-centric. The challenge is ensuring that it doesn’t stop at AI-enabled cancer units in Tier-I cities. Scalable infrastructure must also mean a mobile health van with digital records. Seamless engagement must also mean a teleconsultation for a farmer’s wife in Jharkhand.
India’s Healthcare Reality Check
Before imagining the future, let’s ground ourselves in the present.
- India currently has 1.4 hospital beds per 1,000 people, while the WHO recommends 3 beds per 1,000.
- Nearly 60% of bed capacity lies in the private sector, clustered in metros and Tier-I cities. Smaller towns and villages remain grossly underserved.
- Public health expenditure still hovers at around 2% of GDP, one of the lowest among G20 nations.
This mismatch between demand and supply means that for millions of Indians, the patient journey begins not with a smart OPD or an AI assistant, but with a long bus ride to the nearest district hospital.
Prevention, Prediction and Proactive Intervention
The report emphasises a key shift: moving from reactive healthcare (treating illness) to preventive, predictive and proactive systems.
- Preventive care means regular screenings, immunisations and health education.
- Predictive care uses data analytics to identify at-risk patients early.
- Proactive intervention ensures timely follow-ups and community-level action.
In urban India, this might look like AI models predicting heart disease based on wearable data. In rural India, it could be a mobile van screening villagers for diabetes and hypertension, digitising the results and flagging high-risk cases for specialist review.
Both are part of the same future-ready system if we design inclusively.
Smile Foundation’s Digital Healthcare Work
This is where Smile Foundation’s work becomes a compelling counterpoint to the hospital-centric narrative. Through our Smile on Wheels programme, Smile takes healthcare to places where the system is weakest, this includes urban slums, tribal belts and remote villages.
Each Smile on Wheels unit is a mobile hospital on wheels, staffed with doctors, nurses and community health workers. What makes it future-ready is the integration of digital tools:
- Each unit functions as a moving OPD with EMR-linked patient histories.
- Electronic health records: Patient visits are logged digitally, enabling continuity of care even in transient communities.
- Telemedicine linkages: A villager in Odisha can connect to a specialist in Bhubaneswar through the van’s teleconsultation setup.
- Preventive screenings: Blood pressure, sugar and maternal health indicators are collected systematically, building datasets that support predictive insights.
- Digital health educators: Local health workers trained by Smile use tablets to deliver health education modules in vernacular languages.
As of 2024, Smile on Wheels had reached over 1.5 million people annually across India, often being the only point of healthcare contact for entire communities. This model embodies the 5S framework.
Why Grassroots Digital Models Matter
Large private hospitals will continue to be the flagbearers of cutting-edge health tech — AI in radiology, robotic surgery, cloud-integrated patient records. But for India to be future-ready as a nation, grassroots digital healthcare models like Smile’s are essential.
Here’s why:
- Scalability at low cost – A mobile van can serve thousands of people with minimal infrastructure.
- Trust-building – Local health educators, often women from the same community, bridge the trust gap that tech alone cannot solve.
- Equity – These vans bring digital healthcare to people who would otherwise be excluded from ABDM-linked systems.
- Data inclusion – Digitising rural health records means these populations are not invisible in national health databases.
Without such bottom-up approaches, India risks creating a two-speed healthcare system: AI-driven hospitals for the few and paper-based PHCs for the many.
User Adoption: The Human Side of Digital Healthcare
The success of digital health adoption hinges on users — doctors, nurses and patients — embracing the change.
Smile’s experience echoes this. In many villages, people initially resisted teleconsultations. It took community health educators patiently explaining, demonstrating and accompanying patients through the process to build confidence.
Similarly, doctors needed to see that EMR systems reduced duplication and improved follow-ups, not just added clerical work. Once they experienced smoother workflows, adoption increased.
Future-ready healthcare must invest as much in change management and training as in hardware and software.
Bridging Systemic Barriers to Future-Ready Healthcare
India’s digital health transformation still faces systemic obstacles:
- Fragmented data silos between public and private systems.
- Outdated infrastructure in government hospitals.
- Shortage of IT professionals trained in health informatics.
- Uneven internet connectivity in rural areas.
Smile Foundation addresses some of these barriers by:
- Training local youth as digital health facilitators, easing the IT skill shortage.
- Using cloud-based records to ensure continuity even with patchy local infrastructure.
- Partnering with local administrations to integrate van data with district health databases.
These micro-level interventions offer valuable lessons for scaling national digital health frameworks like ABDM.
Toward Future-Ready Communities
If the goal is equitable, sustainable healthcare, then India’s vision of future-ready must extend beyond hospitals to communities. Imagine:
- A mother in a Delhi slum using a Smile-supported app to track her child’s vaccination.
- A farmer in Chhattisgarh receiving SMS reminders about his blood pressure medication.
- A school in Rajasthan hosting a digital health camp linked to the local PHC.
These examples are already happening in pockets. The task is to scale them systematically.
Policy Pathways
To truly expand future-ready healthcare, India must:
- Integrate grassroots models like Smile on Wheels into ABDM frameworks, ensuring last-mile data flows into national health grids.
- Invest in digital literacy for health workers, not just IT infrastructure.
- Support public-private partnerships that blend high-tech hospital innovation with NGO-led community outreach.
- Mandate outcome reporting — digital health must prove it improves care quality, not just digitisation targets.
- Prioritise equity — allocate resources to underserved geographies first, to avoid widening the urban-rural digital divide.
Engineering Equity into the Future
India’s healthcare is indeed becoming smarter: EMRs, AI, predictive analytics, digital twins. But the real test of “future-ready” is not whether a hospital in Gurugram can perform a robot-assisted surgery. It is whether a tribal child in Jharkhand can get an early diagnosis for anaemia through a digital health van.
The future will be measured not by the sophistication of our machines, but by the breadth of our compassion. And in that future, both AI-assisted hospitals and grassroots digital vans must move in sync because one without the other is not progress, but privilege.
