GenAI significantly enhances patient engagement and retention: ZS’ Manish Menon

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has significantly impacted various industries in recent years, including solving the unique healthcare challenges in India, particularly amid rising costs, greater need for personalised care, workforce shortages, and a surge in diseases. In an interview with TechCircle, Manish Menon, office managing principal at ZS, discusses how GenAI is reshaping healthcare, improving personalised medicine, enhancing patient engagement, and more. Edited excerpts:

How is GenAI changing the healthcare landscape?

GenAI accelerates digital innovation and optimises costs, transforming healthcare R&D by streamlining clinical trials through rapid data processing, automation, and unstructured data mining. This unlocks insights and novel content, also fuelling breakthroughs like digital twin simulation through enhanced data analysis and predictive modelling. Digital twins further personalise healthcare by creating virtual patient replicas for real-time monitoring and predictive modelling. Simulating therapeutic scenarios enhances drug development, reduces risks, and enables tailored treatment plans, collectively redefining precision medicine and patient care. That said, GenAI boosts productivity, decision-making, and process redesign. For pharma, this means deeper patient insights and faster market entry. At ZS, our GenAI integration resulted in achieving over 30% effort reduction and 2-4 times faster execution.

What critical challenges in healthcare do data, AI and analytics help address and solve?

Data, AI, and analytics address critical healthcare challenges by improving speed, depth, and precision across the value chain. ZS believes this leads to breakthrough science by helping teams elucidate disease biology, improve patient stratification, and optimise modality choice, identifying novel targets, biomarkers, and drug candidates. For example, AI significantly narrows the field of potential drug candidates, increasing the probability of success in drug discovery. AI also simulates molecule impact by analysing patient-level and real-world data, dramatically improving throughput and accelerating in-silico drug discovery. Beyond drug development, AI transforms patient care through faster diagnoses, personalised treatments, and predictive insights, improving outcomes and efficiency. As we can see how ZS is helping healthcare firms to be more agile, overcome inertia, break silos, and optimise talent.

Precision and preventive care are crucial for effective healthcare. What are the challenges here and how are firms like ZS solving the problem?

The need of the hour is to address data silos, a significant challenge in India and Asia. Fragmented data sources like pharmacy sales, medical claims, and clinical trial data limit their full potential. Unlike integrated markets like the US, linking these datasets to understand patient journeys is challenging. At ZS, we aim to unlock crucial insights by integrating these datasets (respecting patient consent and privacy) to reveal disease progression, treatment effectiveness, and influences of demographics and location. This holistic approach can lead to more precise and preventive care by engaging more people in preventative care by looking at the person and their health goals more holistically.

In what ways does GenAI contribute to better patient engagement and retention?

GenAI significantly enhances patient engagement and retention, leading to improved health outcomes and increased value for pharmaceutical companies. A ZS study projected a $1.8 billion financial benefit over five years for a pharma company using GenAI and predictive AI, with $500 million stemming from patient engagement and retention initiatives. GenAI personalises patient interactions, tailoring content to individual physicians based on their preferences for more effective communication. It also addresses medication non-adherence by analysing patient conversations to identify reasons for drop-offs (side effects, financial constraints, etc.) and enabling proactive interventions, potentially reducing drop-off rates by 15-20%. This combined approach, leveraging GenAI's unstructured data handling and predictive AI's risk quantification, delivers commercial value and improved patient outcomes.

How is ZS driving innovation in AI and analytics for advancing healthcare transformation?

ZS leverages data, AI, and analytics to help healthcare organisations solve complex challenges and drive impactful outcomes. Our AI-powered solutions enhance decision-making, optimise operations, and accelerate innovation. We integrate technology and expertise to unlock efficiencies, improve patient experiences, and stay ahead in the evolving healthcare landscape. ZS transforms ideas into impact by combining data, science, technology, and human ingenuity to deliver better outcomes for all. For example, we utilise platforms like ZAIDYN (for life sciences commercial use cases with embedded AI) and Max.ai (for cross-industry agents) to build custom AI agents tailored to client needs. Our data science capabilities encompass advanced data management, data fabric development with ZS-curated domain ontologies, smart algorithms infused with pharma expertise, enterprise data lake creation, and optimised sales and engagement planning.

What are your upcoming plans in India, and any hiring goals you can share?

India is central to ZS’ operations, housing nearly 9,000 team members across six offices. 90% of our innovation and client impact is driven from India. Our new Hyderabad office is an integral part of our expansion plans in India, to be closer to our clients and employees — both existing and prospective. There will be opportunities for local tech talent to contribute their skillsets to global corporations setting up or scaling here. We continue to grow our innovation capabilities and hire across levels. We aim to onboard 3,000 people in 2025 across our teams in India.