E-Paper
Technology alone cannot transform health care
This article is authored by Dr Heera Lal, secretary, National Integration, Government of Uttar Pradesh and Dr Adith Chinnaswami, COO & co-founder, MediSim VR.
India’s health care system is entering a defining decade. The country is witnessing rapid expansion in medical infrastructure, digital health systems, AI adoption, and health care access. Yet beneath this momentum lies a structural challenge that deserves far greater national attention: Can India truly build a future-ready health care ecosystem without making significantly larger investments in medical research, advanced health care training, and technology-led clinical education? This question becomes especially relevant on National Technology Day.
For years, India’s health care discourse has largely focused on infrastructure expansion, affordability, and service delivery. These remain critical priorities. However, the next phase of health care transformation will increasingly depend on something deeper: the country’s ability to build indigenous innovation ecosystems, strengthen research and development, and create technologically capable health care human resources at scale.
Health care systems today are no longer evaluated only by the number of hospitals they build. They are judged by the quality of their research capability, training preparedness, technological integration, and clinical outcomes. In that context, India stands at a pivotal intersection of opportunity and risk.
India produces one of the world’s largest pools of medical graduates, nursing professionals, and allied healthcare workers. The expansion of medical colleges and training seats has been significant. Yet the quality of training, hands-on clinical exposure, and outcome-oriented learning remains uneven across institutions and geographies. The gap between theoretical education and real-world clinical readiness continues to persist, and in a rapidly evolving medical landscape, this gap is becoming more consequential.
Modern health care is being reshaped by rising patient loads, complex disease profiles, precision medicine, robotic interventions, AI-assisted diagnostics, and constantly evolving treatment protocols. Traditional education models alone cannot prepare health care professionals for this level of complexity. What is required is a systemic shift toward simulation-led training, immersive learning, and continuous skill development frameworks that mirror real-world scenarios.
Technology must, therefore, move from being an adjunct to becoming a foundational layer of health care capability-building. This makes the case for significantly higher investment in health care-focused research and development, skilling, and institutional capacity building. According to UNESCO estimates, India’s gross expenditure on R&D remains around 0.6 to 0.7% of GDP, far below advanced economies that invest upwards of 2 to 3%. Within this already limited allocation, health care innovation, medical simulation, and training technologies receive only a fraction of attention relative to their strategic importance.
This underinvestment has long-term implications. Countries that lead in health care innovation are not just strengthening their domestic systems; they are shaping global standards in biotechnology, medical devices, AI-enabled diagnostics, simulation-based training, and digital therapeutics. They are exporting not just products, but protocols, platforms, and intellectual capital.
India cannot aspire to become a global health care leader while remaining dependent on imported technologies and externally developed training ecosystems. The challenge is not simply about adoption. It is about building endogenous capability.
There is, however, a strong foundation to build upon. Initiatives such as the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, the IndiaAI Mission, and the broader digital public infrastructure push reflect a clear policy direction toward integrating technology into governance and service delivery. Similarly, the National Education Policy 2020 has opened pathways for multidisciplinary, technology-enabled, and flexible learning ecosystems. These are important building blocks. But they must now translate into deep, systemic adoption within health care education and research.
One of the most critical gaps lies in the fragmentation of technology adoption. Institutions often procure advanced tools without embedding them into structured curricula, assessment systems, or measurable learning outcomes. Technology risks becoming symbolic rather than transformative. To address this, India must focus on three parallel priorities.
First, strengthening medical R&D ecosystems through sustained funding, institutional collaboration, and incentives for academia-industry partnerships. Research must not remain confined to isolated centres of excellence but should become a distributed national capability, with linkages across medical colleges, research institutions, startups, and health care providers.
Second, a national push toward skilling and continuous capacity building is essential. Health care professionals must be equipped not just with foundational knowledge but with adaptive skills that evolve alongside technology. Simulation-led training, AI-assisted learning systems, and immersive clinical environments should become standard components of medical and nursing education. This is particularly important for bridging the urban-rural divide in training quality.
Third, health care training itself must be treated as critical national infrastructure. Just as physical infrastructure enables economic growth, training infrastructure determines the quality and resilience of healthcare delivery. Investments in simulation labs, digital training platforms, and competency-based assessment systems must be scaled with the same urgency as hospital expansion.
Global experience offers valuable lessons. The US has institutionalised simulation-based training across medical education, with structured accreditation frameworks and outcome-based evaluation. The UK’s National Health Service integrates simulation into continuous professional development, ensuring that skills are regularly updated. Singapore has invested in national-level simulation centres that combine research, training, and clinical excellence under a unified ecosystem. Israel’s strong academia-industry collaboration model has enabled rapid translation of medical research into deployable technologies.
The common thread across these systems is clear. Technology adoption is deeply integrated with research, training, and measurable outcomes. It is not treated as an add-on. India can adapt these principles to its own context. This would involve establishing national standards for simulation-based education, incentivising research collaborations, embedding technology into accreditation frameworks, and ensuring equitable access to advanced training tools across regions.
At the same time, India must address structural challenges such as funding constraints, faculty training gaps, limited industry-academia alignment, and the absence of standardised evaluation metrics for technology-enabled learning. These are not insurmountable barriers, but they require coordinated policy, institutional commitment, and long-term vision. The objective is not to replace human expertise with technology. It is to augment human capability.
In a country with vast health care demand, workforce shortages, and regional disparities, scalable and intelligent training systems are essential. A student in a Tier 2 or Tier 3 city should have access to the same quality of immersive learning and clinical preparedness as one in a premier institution. Technology, if deployed correctly, can make that possible.
The health care systems of the future will be built at the intersection of medicine, data, AI, simulation, and education. Nations that invest early and strategically in these intersections will define global leadership.
India has the scale, talent, and policy momentum to lead. What it now needs is a sharper focus on research, skilling, and capacity-building as core pillars of health care transformation.
On National Technology Day, the conversation must therefore move beyond celebrating innovation in isolation. The real test lies in whether India can build the institutional depth, research capability, and training ecosystems required to convert technological potential into measurable health care outcomes. The future of healthcare will not be shaped only inside hospitals. It will be shaped inside research labs, simulation centres, classrooms, and innovation ecosystems that prepare healthcare professionals for a far more complex world ahead.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Dr Heera Lal, secretary, National Integration, Government of Uttar Pradesh and Dr Adith Chinnaswami, COO & co-founder, MediSim VR.
