Why Indian healthcare cannot function in silos: leaders weigh in

At The Hindu Deep Tech Summit 2026 on Tuesday (April 7, 2026), a quiet but decisive shift in thinking took centre stage — the end of silos in healthcare cannot afford to be theoretical, it has to be operational. At the panel on ‘Convergence of Disciplines: End of Traditional Engineering Silos’, moderated by Koushik Ramani, managing partner and co-founder, NetworkGain Consulting, voices from medicine, technology, and venture capital converged to outline what the future of healthcare must look like — integrated, adaptive, and deeply human.

For Puhazhendi Kaliyappan, a leading medical devices consultant and advisor, the transformation is already underway. The traditional pillars of healthcare — pharma, in-vitro diagnostics, and medical devices — are dissolving into one another. Technologies once treated as standalone products are now components feeding into larger, AI-driven systems focused on outcomes. “Everything is becoming outcome-driven,” he said, pointing to shifts, including home-based care, community-level screening, and even emerging diagnostics based on smell. The question, he argued, is no longer about devices, but infrastructure — how do we build healthcare into everyday spaces like homes and apartments?

From the hospital floor, Aravind Ganesan, chief technology officer of Kauvery Hospital, grounded this vision in reality. “It’s actually nonsensical to build in silos in healthcare,” he said, emphasising that systems designed without doctors or patients in mind inevitably fail. Healthcare, he noted, is uniquely complex — serving both doctor and patient as “a unit of one”. Without integrating clinical workflows and addressing workforce shortages, even the most advanced technologies risk irrelevance.

For Vishal Gandhi, founder and CEO, BIO Rx and chief investment officer at the Indian Healthcare Angels, convergence is not new — it is foundational. Trained in biotechnology, he described a discipline inherently built at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and biology. What has changed, he said, is scale and speed. With AI entering drug discovery, the industry is beginning to de-risk a historically high-failure process. From reducing dependence on animal trials to enabling precision medicine and surgery, “You are the real doctor,” Dr. Gandhi said, pointing toward a future of real time, personalised healthcare powered by data.

Yet, technology alone cannot guarantee impact. Senthil Kumar Rajendran, investor, partner, mentor and advisor, warned that without coordination, even the most sophisticated systems collapse into irrelevance. As AI blurs boundaries, value lies not in isolated innovation but in connected ecosystems. “If your systems are not built to solve coordination, the purpose itself goes for a toss,” he said, adding that healthcare remains a “black horse”—not just financially, but in its potential to transform lives.

That transformation is already reshaping care delivery. Hospitals, Mr. Ganesan said, may soon evolve into distributed care networks, with routine monitoring shifting to homes through wearables and connected devices. What we call healthcare today, Mr. Rajendran added, has largely been “sick care” — reactive rather than preventive. The next decade could reverse that.

Underlying it all was a simple but powerful reminder — healthcare is not a hardware problem, or a software problem; it is a human problem. And human problems, by nature, refuse to stay in silos.