AMCHAM’s Agriculture & Food Processing Committee organized a virtual meeting on September 27th under the leadership of Mr. Prashant Peres, Chairman – Agriculture & Food Processing Committee, AMCHAM & Managing Director – South Asia, Kellogg’s. Mr. Ronald Verdonk, Minister Counselor for Agricultural Affairs, U.S. Embassy, in his special remarks, talked about the bilateral trade in agriculture between India and the U.S. He also drew a comparison between the American food companies doing business in India and the trade focussed issues and discussed the integration between the entire food value chain. Ms. Komple Sharma, Director, AMCHAM gave a presentation covering past initiatives, vision, objectives, means and future engagement themes. The committee discussed ways to create more visibility of the good work being done by American companies operating in this sector in India, road map for the committee, identifying specific government bodies/agencies with whom networking sessions could be planned and key focus areas for the signature event. The meeting concluded with a vote of thanks by the chair.

AMCHAM’s Karnataka Chapter hosted the CEO Series: Discussion on Gearing up for the Future of Workforce on September 27th at the Hyatt Centric, Bengaluru. The session focussed on recent trends that the services industry has been grappling with to prepare and address for the future. The theme allowed participants to deliberate on some of the emerging trends around talent preferences on what it will take to attract the right talent, evolving demands on what it will take to retain and nurture talent for the long haul, productivity challenges and how to sustain and drive performance, emerging market dynamics, what it will take to work through trends around working in the hybrid virtual model, moonlighting, etc. The speaker was Ms. Shalini Pillay, Office Managing Partner at KPMG in Bengaluru.

AMCHAM’s 10th Healthcare Conference was held on September 23rd at HICC Novotel Hyderabad with the theme ‘Paradigm Shift in Healthcare’ with two sessions – ‘Healthcare Systems – Change for the Better’ and ‘Tech Innovation in Healthcare.’ In the inaugural session Mr. Prakash Bodla, Chairman – Hyderabad Chapter, AMCHAM and MD, Carrier Technologies spoke on the need to revamp Indian Healthcare. Guest of Honor, Mr. Andrew Edlefsen, Principal Commercial Officer, U.S. Consulate General Hyderabad spoke on creating bridges between U.S. healthcare companies and the Indian market. He emphasized the need to keep the dialogue going and create opportunities in the healthcare sector. He said it will always be one of the strong pillars and everyone must continue to work together with new technologies and innovations that help advance the cause of healthcare in India. Mr. Divya Prakash, VP, Medtronic, spoke on the healthcare landscape and advancement of automated surgical theaters to robotic surgery. With AI as the future, it is more of digital engineering in healthcare. COVID brought about emergence of alternative approaches to health monitoring – remote patient monitoring and how to use data for predicting patient outcomes. By combining profound understanding of the human body with leading science its possible to accelerate innovation-driven care, insight driven care where data, ai and automation are turned into action. Mr. Vaidyanathan Krishnan, VP Engineering, Providence, spoke on making healthcare available and affordable for all and how technology transformation can bring that difference. Empowering the patient on the type of care and accessibility of healthcare wherever they are. He mentioned that tele-health is a major factor and is making a big difference in healthcare, bringing strategic transformation in enabling good healthcare for a better world. This can be done by enhancing the patient experience and increasing productivity. Care experience can be transformed by leveraging technology in healthcare. Data privacy and centralization were some of the issues encountered in the patient care system. The time has come to move from hospital as the central point to patient as the central point. Awareness is key so people can make use of technology for ease of healthcare accessibility and requires simplifying, modernizing and innovating. He said prediction, prevention and care are vital in having a robust healthcare system and it can be achieved using AI/ML.

The first session was a fireside chat with Dr. Sonali Chaturvedi, CEO, Sahasrara Health Consulting and Mr. Kaustav Banerjee, VP South Asia, Zimmer Biomet, moderated by Mr. Ritesh Dogra, AVP, Indegene. The discussion has moved from analog to digital to data driven to patient-centric healthcare where care is delivered at home. Earlier there was a focus on safety and efficacy of devices. When looking at the building blocks of the health system the first is delivery, then accessibility, healthcare workforce and healthcare financing, with major progress in healthcare delivery. Harnessing data to make efficient clinical decisions has been progressing. Wearables help us with the clinical outcomes and healthcare technology companies are making an impact. COVID has played a catalytic role in bringing the healthcare technology to the forefront, even with remote monitoring. The discussion also touched upon how providers look at building efficiency and focus on patient safety, understanding healthcare costs, disease management cost and patient education. The appreciation of health economic value is important, as affordable healthcare may not be very efficient, it has to be affordable but the outcome is important. The speakers also responded to questions posed to them by the audience on health technology assessment board, long term data, device performance and economic value, among other topics.

The final session of the day was ‘Tech Innovation Healthcare’ moderated by Dr. Ambuj Chaturvedi, VP, IKP Knowledge Park along with Mr. Hari Atmakuri, VP Healthcare Analytics, Providence, Mr. Naresh Kumar P, CEO, Asian Spine Hospital, Mr. Karthik Duddala, Sr. Director IT and Global IT Services, Parexel and Mr. Amol Kodag, Director Engineering, Head R&D Cardiovascular Portfolio, Medtronic. Adoption of technology has taken time with the first 50 years focused on imaging and innovation on interventions. Post 1990 healthcare informatics has emerged. Technology brings key enablers. There has been no dearth of technology, but the implementation should be consistent. Care delivery, care experience and care outcome are the three pillars that need to be the focus and ensure technology is integrated enterprise wide. Stitching all the technologies to bring about a solution is a challenge that an engineering mindset can bring about a solution for. Converting it into a scalable option is the key for jugaad. To transform research into clinical practice, delivery, experience and outcome need to collaborate to bring about the entire care-pathway. Technology can play a role by ensuring that the three are integrated and collaborated to bring about great outcomes. Outcomes need strong evidence-built platforms. The panelists discussed what parameters can be looked at to standardize outcomes, examples of good or bad outcome outcomes, driving awareness and how technology should be viewed from a patient point of view.

AMCHAM’s Eastern Region, in partnership with KPMG, organized an interactive CEO breakfast session at the Hyatt Regency on September 23rd on ‘Advanced Digital Transformation’ which covered digitization, automation, IOT, sustainability and analytics. Ms. Amada Kidwai, Regional Director – Eastern Region, AMCHAM introduced the speakers. Mr. Atanu Mukherjee, Chairman – Eastern Region, AMCHAM gave the welcome address. Mr. Somnath De, Associate Partner, KPMG in India was the guest speaker at the session. He discussed how digital is not new to India and that every day Indian enterprises are adopting and enhancing their affinity towards digital considering the great leap of the digital economy cited by India’s Finance Minister as well other union ministers of states. He talked about hoe digitalization and digitization are not the same, and how we very often use these terms interchangeably. He spoke about how digital transformation is the process of transforming digital needs by enhancing techniques to address business requirements like better efficiency, better customer connects, reducing risks, etc. He said digital transformations were significantly dependent on areas of digitalization (though most of the organization had adopted it, but there were still significant improvement opportunities), whilst more digital means more exposure towards the world of cyber and other risks and requires a robust digital risk management system. He discussed how hidden risks are related to wrong reporting, unintentionally or unknowingly, and taking strategy decisions based on not having proper governance of data, not understanding an organization’s own data, not having the same vocabulary across the organization. He shared ‘Advanced Data Management Framework 3.0’ to address these gaps and to have a robust digital ecosystem to achieve the organization’s vision with enhanced data ethics. Ms. Urmi Roy, representing Data Core Systems, gave the concluding remarks and vote of thanks.