How Well Will You Be Tomorrow?

Al-powered diagnostics is changing the landscape of healthcare in India, with a new emphasis on disease prediction and lifestyle interventions rather than post facto cure

- SONALI ACHARJEE

WHAT IF SOMEONE COULD TELL YOU SUFFICIENTLY IN ADVANCE WHAT DISEASE YOU ARE LIKELY TO GET IN THE FUTURE, and you act on it so that the possibility does not come to pass at all? That is what a special health screening package at Nura, a Fujifilm-Dr Kutty’s Healthcare collaboration, can help determine.

Enter their premises in Gurugram and you may be forgiven for thinking you have strayed into a luxury hotel. There are Japanese wood-panelled gardens and you are welcomed with a cup of matcha tea. Then you are dressed in a kimono and personally escorted to a set of rooms spread over two floors. Inside, however, instead of hot tubs, you find blood pressure monitors, CT scan and ECG machines. Computerised tomography, electrocardiogram...each test takes you to a dedicated room. The machines themselves are equipped with high-resolution cameras, sensors and technology that reduces radiation emissions by 97 per cent, allowing more frequent scans for certain cancers.

The future is here. And it has changed the whole approach to medicine. If conventional wisdom mandated that prevention is better than cure, the new buzzword is prediction. As Dr Naresh Trehan, Chairman, Medanta-The Medicity, Gurugram, says, “Traditionally, we thought we should invest in treating disease. Then, a few decades ago, we realised we should try and prevent disease. But preventive healthcare was very general and didn’t motivate people to take the steps needed to stay out of hospitals.” So, now we are talking of “predictive healthcare”, he explains, “where we use multiple factors such as a patient’s environment, genetics and some blood parameters to see if he or she is at a higher risk for a non-communicable disease, and come up with a personalised preventive plan.”