India has arrived at a genuine inflection point. On 17 February, at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the Union Health Minister launched SAHI, the national strategy for artificial intelligence in healthcare, with its companion platform BODH, built by IIT Kanpur with the National Health Authority to evaluate AI models against real-world data without exposing the underlying datasets. India became the first country in the WHO South-East Asia Region to adopt such a strategy, and strategy and platform arrived the same day. The two are usually separated by years.
Yet beneath the momentum lies a structural risk. Look at where health AI is deployed in markets that started earlier. Bain’s 2025 survey found the leading uses to be documentation, clinical documentation improvement and coding. Rock Health reported AI-enabled companies taking 54 per cent of digital health funding last year, up from 37. And the 2025 CAQH Index found more than half of health plans using AI in administrative workflows against roughly a quarter of providers: payers automating the review of claims faster than providers can produce them.
