Apollo 24/7’s digital shift: Integrating AI and data for scalable healthcare

Digital transformation in healthcare often starts with technology but depends on how deeply it is woven into daily practice. For Apollo 24/7, the process has been less an overhaul of legacy systems and more a ground-up, digital-first infrastructure: "We didn’t upgrade from paper to digital. Apollo 24/7 was built as a native digital business, designed to connect all arms of our ecosystem," says Madhivanan Balakrishnan, CEO of Apollo 24/7.

A Platform-Centric Transformation

The origins of Apollo 24/7 lie in a pivotal pandemic moment. As Balakrishnan recalls, the demand for remote care “pushed us to create a single digital gateway for all Apollo services.” Unlike traditional healthcare institutions, the platform is one digital entity, its app connects users to every Apollo hospital, diagnostic center, and pharmacy. This means a unified patient experience instead of fragmented touchpoints.

AI and Data Under the Hood

What gives Apollo 24/7 its distinctive character is its approach to AI and data. “Our personal health record is like a financial statement for health—it doesn’t just track information from Apollo, but absorbs whatever the patient chooses to share,” Balakrishnan explains. This record underpins everything: AI models learn from pharmacy purchases, test results, and previous consultations to anticipate needs and inform both users and doctors. The technology functions as both a patient-facing tool (“Ask Apollo”) and a doctor-facing clinical investigation engine, built on secure cloud infrastructure that spans Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Azure.

“AI is not a generic answer engine. For us, it's contextual, if you’re diabetic, advice will reflect your history, test results, and even medication changes,” Balakrishnan notes. All outputs are double-checked by medical officers and subject to governance through an ethics committee, closing the loop between digital speed and clinical reliability.

Balancing Scale, Privacy, and Change

Expansion at scale brings its own hurdles: integrating 40 years of Apollo’s clinical records, now digitized and authenticated, requires robust security and compliance. “We work with both structured and unstructured data, but nothing leaves our ecosystem without patient consent and a universal health ID,” Balakrishnan emphasizes.

The most significant challenge, however, might be cultural rather than technical. “Adoption among experienced clinicians takes time. Those trained in traditional ways must learn new workflows, but we see steady progress as younger doctors enter the field.”

What Lies Ahead

While operational improvements, AI-driven prescription checks, triage, and appointment preparation, are already in play, Apollo 24/7’s next frontier is agentic AI, capable of unobtrusively capturing and organizing care as it happens. As Balakrishnan puts it, “Healthcare will always be personal, but tech can handle the complexity behind the scenes, letting clinicians focus on care itself.”