Indian healthcare providers are moving artificial intelligence (AI) from pilots to practice, according to a joint report by Bain & Company and HealthQuad. The report, ‘AI in Indian Healthcare Delivery’, finds that AI capabilities have advanced rapidly in recent years, and India’s healthcare infrastructure is well-positioned to accelerate the adoption and scale of AI.
Government initiatives, rising electronic medical record (EMR) penetration, deployment of private capital, a thriving start-up ecosystem, and clinician acceptance are strengthening the enabling environment. However, adoption in hospitals remains nascent and uneven, with the majority of providers still running AI pilots.
AI Adoption in Indian Healthcare
The report notes that meaningful scale is limited to operational use cases, and only a handful of providers are expanding into more clinical applications. This gap, combined with a significant improvement in AI’s technological capabilities, opens up previously unexplored areas for exponential growth.
Newer generative and agentic systems can increasingly execute multistep workflows with limited supervision, while the amount of expert-level work AI can complete autonomously has been doubling every six to nine months since 2023. For providers, this creates an opportunity to reduce the administrative burden on doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.
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Dhruv Sukhrani, head of Bain & Company’s Healthcare & Life Sciences practice in India, said, “AI adoption in Indian healthcare is still early, but the conditions for it to scale are strengthening quickly. The technology itself has advanced significantly; the harder question now is how providers redesign workflows, manage change and build trust among doctors and nurses.
Furthermore, the report highlights that the cost of frontier AI models has fallen by approximately 92% since 2023, making these capabilities more accessible to healthcare providers. This decrease in cost, combined with the advancements in AI technology, is expected to drive further adoption and innovation in the Indian healthcare sector.
Enablers for Healthcare AI at Scale
Three enablers will determine how quickly the foundations translate into healthcare AI at scale: data readiness, regulatory clarity, and locally applied talent. EMR adoption in India is currently at ~35%, which remains well below the US and UK, and is concentrated among larger urban hospital chains.
India’s framework for adaptive and autonomous clinical AI is still evolving, particularly around accountability, data governance, and clinical validation. Additionally, much of India’s AI talent is currently directed toward global markets, rather than the local healthcare industry.
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Namit Chugh, director at HealthQuad, said: “Healthcare in India has always been constrained by scarcity of clinicians leading to enormous variation in access and outcomes. AI can potentially change that equation by being not just an efficiency lever, but a capacity multiplier.
The report also emphasizes the importance of addressing the scarcity of clinicians in India, which has led to significant variations in access and outcomes. By leveraging AI, healthcare providers can potentially increase their capacity to deliver high-quality care, thereby reducing the gap in access and outcomes.
Opportunities for Growth
The report identifies significant headroom in areas such as remote patient monitoring, operating theatre and ICU optimization, and post-discharge chronic disease management. For start-ups, providers without strong in-house technology capabilities represent a major opportunity, as demand is shifting toward integrated platforms that combine AI with the underlying data infrastructure needed to deploy it.
As AI moves deeper into clinical workflows, integration, data readiness, and trust become more significant constraints, with providers typically requiring human oversight. They bring a clinician-first lens across the patient journey, which is closely aligned with the investment thesis of HealthQuad’s Fund III.
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Indian start-ups are already building across the patient journey: pre-visit and access, diagnostics and inpatient treatment, and post-discharge care. As the ecosystem matures, the winners are likely to be those that go beyond the AI model itself, solving for clinical validation, workflow integration, local data, and clinician trust.
Bain & Company and HealthQuad’s report highlights the potential for AI to transform Indian healthcare. They note that the key to successful adoption lies in addressing the enablers and opportunities for growth. The report’s findings are significant, as they provide insight into the current state of AI adoption in Indian healthcare.
The report’s emphasis on the need for integrated platforms that combine AI with data infrastructure is particularly relevant, given the current state of EMR adoption in India. By developing and implementing such platforms, healthcare providers can overcome the constraints of data readiness and integration, ultimately unlocking the full potential of AI in Indian healthcare.
