In this exclusive interview with Veloxx Media, Prof. Praveen Bist, Chief Information Officer, Amrita Hospitals, shares how true digital transformation in healthcare goes beyond technology to redesign care delivery. He highlights the importance of clinician-led adoption, integrated systems, and ecosystem-driven approaches for better outcomes. He also discusses AI’s growing role in improving efficiency while urging caution in clinical use. He underscores the shift toward continuous, patient-centric care enabled by digital platforms. Ultimately, he emphasizes measuring success through real impact on care and efficiency, not just system deployment.
Below are the given edited excerpts:
- Many hospitals digitise individual functions, but real transformation is much harder. In your view, what is the gap between installing technology and actually changing how healthcare is delivered?
Many organisations mistake digitisation for transformation, but the two are fundamentally different. Installing technology is often the easiest part of the journey; the real challenge lies in reimagining how care is delivered around that technology.
True digital transformation requires changing mindsets, redesigning workflows, and aligning people across departments to work differently. If organisations simply layer technology onto outdated processes, they may become digital, but they do not become transformed.
In healthcare especially, technology must act as an enabler of better care delivery—not just as a replacement for paper or manual tasks. The real shift happens when institutions move from thinking about software implementation to thinking about organisational reinvention.
Ultimately, digital transformation is not an IT project—it is a care delivery transformation enabled by technology.
- You have spoken about the need to bring clinicians onboard while designing EMR and digital workflows. In practical terms, what does clinician-led adoption really look like, and why do so many hospital IT projects struggle without it?
Clinician-led adoption means involving clinicians not simply as end users, but as co-creators of the digital systems they will ultimately rely upon. They must have a meaningful voice in shaping workflows, defining usability, and influencing implementation decisions from the outset.
The reason many hospital IT projects struggle is because organisations often involve clinicians too late—or involve them only symbolically. In many cases, the right clinicians are identified, but they are also among the busiest professionals in the hospital, leaving them little time to contribute meaningfully.
For clinician-led adoption to truly succeed, leadership must make digital transformation a strategic priority and create dedicated bandwidth for clinician participation. If clinicians are expected to “fit it in” around their regular responsibilities, the engagement rarely goes deep enough.
Technology adoption in hospitals succeeds when clinicians feel they have built the solution—not when they feel it has been imposed upon them.
- In a hospital, everything has to connect – HIS, EMR, lab systems, radiology, pharmacy, billing, ICU, and more. From your perspective, what makes integration work well, and what usually causes it to break down?
Successful integration begins with one simple principle: hospital systems must be designed around healthcare delivery, not around software modules. Too often, organisations procure systems function by function, only to later struggle with fragmentation.
Integration works best when hospitals take an ecosystem view—designing around end-to-end workflows, ensuring data is captured at the point of care, and building on interoperability standards from the outset. Every component must function as part of one connected clinical and operational journey.
Where integration breaks down is when systems are deployed in silos, each optimised for departmental needs without regard for enterprise-wide workflows. It also fails when hospitals focus too heavily on billing or administrative outputs instead of designing around patient care first.
Billing should be the outcome of healthcare delivery—not the force that drives system design.
- AI is now becoming part of the hospital conversation, from documentation support to workflow improvement. Where do you think AI is already proving useful in healthcare, and where is the hype still ahead of the reality?
AI is already proving its value in practical and measurable ways—particularly in documentation support, transcription, workflow automation, and administrative optimisation. These are areas where hospitals can reduce burden, improve efficiency, and unlock immediate operational gains.
One of AI’s most promising contributions is helping convert previously untapped information into usable digital data. In India, much of the clinician–patient interaction remains verbal, and historically very little of that has been captured in structured form. AI now gives us the ability to digitise conversations, dictated notes, and handwritten inputs in ways that were not previously possible.
Where the hype is ahead of reality is in assuming AI can independently drive complex clinical decisions in the immediate future. While the potential is immense, meaningful clinical AI requires high-quality data, governance, oversight, and deep contextual validation.
AI will undoubtedly transform healthcare—but thoughtful implementation must precede ambitious expectations.
- With ABDM pushing connected health records and interoperability, what does meaningful digital integration look like for a hospital in practice, beyond just compliance or record linkage?
Meaningful digital integration goes far beyond record exchange or regulatory compliance. The real objective is not simply to connect systems, but to create continuity of care through connected intelligence.
In practice, this means enabling clinicians to access the right information at the right time without navigating fragmented systems, and ensuring patients experience seamless care across multiple touchpoints and providers. True interoperability should reduce duplication, improve decision-making, and accelerate care delivery.
ABDM creates the framework, but hospitals must go beyond compliance and ask a deeper question: how does connected data actually improve patient care and operational outcomes?
Interoperability should not be viewed as a compliance exercise—it should be viewed as a care enabler.
- Hospital technology often has to respond to very different expectations from doctors, patients, and administrators. How do you design digital systems that can serve all three in a balanced and practical way?
Designing effective hospital technology is ultimately about balancing competing expectations without compromising the broader care objective. Doctors seek efficiency and clinical usability, patients expect convenience and transparency, while administrators need visibility and operational control.
The answer lies in designing around the full healthcare journey rather than individual user silos. Systems must be architected holistically, with strong backend integration but personalised front-end experiences tailored to each stakeholder.
No digital platform can optimise perfectly for one group at the expense of another. The goal is not perfection for one stakeholder—it is balance across the ecosystem.
The best hospital technology serves everyone differently, while aligning everyone toward the same outcome.
- Hospital ecosystem is strengthened due to digital health and telemedicine application. Going forward how do you see the next phase of hospital IT evolving beyond the hospital building itself and toward more continuous, connected care?
The next evolution of hospital IT will fundamentally shift healthcare from episodic care to continuous care. Traditionally, hospital systems were designed around interactions that happened within hospital walls. That model is changing rapidly.
Going forward, hospitals will increasingly remain digitally connected with patients before, during, and after physical encounters—through telemedicine, remote monitoring, wearables, home diagnostics, and patient engagement platforms.
The future hospital will no longer be defined purely by its physical infrastructure, but by its digital ability to stay connected with patients across the entire care continuum.
Healthcare is moving from hospital-centric to patient-centric, and technology will be the bridge enabling that transformation.
- From your perspective as CIO, where should hospitals like Amrita move more decisively with technology today, and where is a more careful, measured approach still necessary?
Hospitals should move decisively in areas where value is already proven—workflow digitisation, automation, interoperability, cybersecurity, analytics, and AI-assisted administrative functions all represent clear opportunities for immediate progress.
Where caution is required is in areas involving direct clinical autonomy, predictive diagnostics, and high-impact AI-driven clinical interventions. In these domains, the consequences are more significant, and adoption must be guided by evidence, governance, and strong validation.
Healthcare organisations cannot afford to be stagnant, but equally they cannot afford reckless innovation.
The right strategy is simple: move fast where technology is mature, and move carefully where the stakes are highest. Fortunately, Amrita as an organization, also have technical expertise as well as software engineers, as part of the University, so it gives us an edge over other hospitals.
- In the context of the DPDP framework and the broader push toward connected digital health systems, how should healthcare institutions think about consent, access control, data governance, and trust while building more integrated digital platforms?
As healthcare becomes more connected, trust becomes the single most important currency in digital transformation. Patients will only embrace digital ecosystems if they believe their information is protected and used responsibly.
Hospitals must therefore treat governance as foundational, not secondary. Consent mechanisms must be transparent and meaningful, access controls should be role-based and context-driven, and every interaction with patient data must be traceable and auditable.
Compliance is important—but trust cannot be built through compliance alone.
Healthcare institutions must move from simply protecting data to actively stewarding trust.
- When hospitals invest in digital transformation, the real question is whether it improves care, efficiency, and outcomes on the ground. In your view, how should hospital leadership measure whether a digital initiative is truly delivering value?
Digital transformation should never be judged by implementation milestones alone. A system going live does not mean it is delivering value.
The true measure of success lies in outcomes—whether the initiative improves patient care, enhances clinician productivity, reduces operational friction, shortens turnaround times, and strengthens financial performance. Leadership must evaluate both quantitative metrics and frontline experience.
Equally important is asking whether the technology simplifies work or adds burden. If users find workarounds, avoid adoption, or feel more burdened after implementation, then the initiative has failed regardless of technical deployment.
Technology should always be measured by impact, not by installation.
