‘Healthcare must go beyond hospitals’: Apollo’s Sangita Reddy at Garmin Summit

“Healthcare should not begin and end with a hospital visit,” said Dr Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director of Apollo Hospitals, calling for greater use of artificial intelligence (AI) and health-monitoring devices to identify potential health risks before they develop into serious illnesses. She was speaking at the Garmin Health Summit in Bangkok on Thursday, October 29.

Garmin is a US-based company that develops GPS-enabled smartwatches and fitness tracking devices with health monitoring features. Its devices track a range of biometric and activity data, including heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep, stress, respiration, blood oxygen levels and physical activity. Through its Garmin Health platform and application programming interface (API), the company allows this data to be integrated with healthcare providers’ digital health platforms and used for research, patient monitoring and wellness programmes.

In a keynote titled ‘From Hospitals to Everywhere: Reimagining Care with AI and Technology’, Reddy said integrating data from smartwatches with medical records could help doctors monitor patients between consultations, identify changes in their health and provide more personalised care.

Exploring this through its existing collaboration with Garmin, the initiative by Apollo Hospitals includes testing health monitoring devices in rural India to understand how continuous monitoring could improve preventive healthcare. The effort also comes as Apollo looks at ways to make technology-driven healthcare more affordable.

From hospital visits to continuous monitoring

Reddy said that healthcare systems needed to move beyond relying on information collected during occasional hospital visits and pay greater attention to what happens between consultations.

There are 8,760 hours in a year, she noted, and a hospital visit provides only a snapshot of a person’s health. Continuous monitoring could help doctors understand changes over time rather than relying solely on readings taken during appointments.

“The human body gives us signals before a major health event. The question is whether we are able to pick up those signals, understand what they mean and act on them in time,” she said.

The challenge, she said, was not simply collecting more health data but understanding what it means and translating it into timely action. This requires combining engineering and clinical expertise to interpret information from different sources.

“Apollo’s personal health record (PHR) system is one step towards this approach,” Reddy said. Patients can access their medical records, ask questions and consult doctors through telemedicine. Online consultations and video consultations conducted at clinics can also be added to their records.

This could give doctors a more complete picture of a patient’s health. For instance, a cardiologist seeing a patient after six months could review the person’s earlier consultations, medical history and prescribed medication instead of relying only on what the patient recalls during the appointment.

Reddy also highlighted medication adherence as an area that receives insufficient attention in many wellness applications. If a patient prescribed a statin has purchased only one bottle, for instance, the doctor may need to establish whether the patient is taking the medication regularly or obtaining it elsewhere.

She said health monitoring systems should account for the different ways the body responds to changes. Using her own experience as an example, she said stopping blood pressure medication could give her a headache by the third day, followed by elevated blood pressure by the fifth day.

Such patterns could help doctors understand how a person’s health changes over time, provided the data is interpreted in the right clinical context.

Reddy also argued that health could not be reduced to sleep, diet, exercise and medication alone. Purpose and social engagement were important too, particularly for older people. The challenge, she said, was to turn complex scientific information into simple, actionable advice that people could use in their daily lives.

Apollo already uses historical patient records to assess health risks based on multiple indicators. Reddy said the broader goal was to bring information from different devices and medical records together to develop a more continuous picture of a person’s health and integrate AI into clinical decision-making.

She said healthcare systems could not address growing demand simply by continuing to add hospital beds. Greater emphasis was needed on prevention and early detection, including identifying illnesses such as cancer before they reach an advanced stage.

Apollo and Garmin test 100 watches in rural India

Speaking to The News Minute on the sidelines of the summit, Reddy said 100 Garmin watches had been provided free of cost for testing in Aragonda, Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh as part of efforts to understand how such devices could be used in healthcare.

The pilot, named Grameen by Garmin, is intended to help assess the devices’ usefulness and affordability before the companies decide how to proceed.

“We are doing testing. Let’s study the testing, figure out the pricing, ask them for special models,” she said, explaining that the findings would help determine the next steps.

The initiative builds on the existing strategic collaboration between Garmin India and Apollo HealthAxis, an Apollo Hospitals subsidiary. Announced in August 2025, the collaboration includes integrating Garmin’s health data with Apollo’s digital health programmes.

Under the arrangement, Garmin’s health data integration system can feed information from its devices into Apollo’s programmes. Apollo’s Total Health initiative, which focuses on community health, is using the integration to explore the monitoring and management of chronic conditions such as diabetes in rural areas.

The collaboration also includes research into whether continuous health tracking can improve health outcomes in underserved communities.

In urban areas, select Garmin fitness tracker customers can access Apollo ProHealth, a doctor-driven programme that uses health information to assess disease risks and offer lifestyle recommendations. Selected Apollo health plans also include Garmin devices.

The devices can track indicators such as heart rate variability, sleep, stress, respiration, activity and estimated oxygen consumption. Such measurements may help build a broader picture of a person’s health, but their usefulness depends on how they are interpreted alongside clinical information.

Reddy said the rural pilot would help the companies understand what kind of devices and pricing could work for communities with limited access to healthcare. The testing is still under way and the next steps will depend on the findings.

Making preventive healthcare affordable

Affordability remains a major challenge in expanding the use of digital health tools in India, Reddy said.

She argued that India should not simply wait for technologies developed elsewhere to become cheaper nor dismiss them as too expensive. Instead, the country should invest in local manufacturing and develop algorithms suited to Indian populations and healthcare needs.

“India had demonstrated that it could reduce the cost of medicines and medical procedures. Similar efforts could help make health monitoring technology more accessible,” she said.

“We have to co-create with Indian capability, for India and for the world,” was her message.

Reddy also suggested that shared devices could serve as an interim solution in communities where individual ownership remains unaffordable. She compared this to the early days of mobile phones, when families often shared a single device before prices fell and ownership became widespread.

She said the cost of technology was continuing to decline, creating opportunities to expand access over time. However, making devices affordable would need to go hand in hand with reliable connectivity, accessible healthcare services and systems that can turn the data collected into meaningful interventions.

“India’s mobile connectivity and growing familiarity with telemedicine offer an opportunity to extend healthcare beyond hospitals. Government programmes, including Ayushman Bharat and telemedicine services, could support this shift alongside private healthcare providers,” she said.

Reddy described the changes under way as a quiet healthcare revolution, with technology potentially helping doctors reach people who might otherwise have limited access to regular medical attention.

AI to change the role of doctors

Reddy said AI would change how doctors work over the next five to 10 years, with routine tasks increasingly automated and clinicians able to devote more time to patient education, counselling, research and innovation.

She said doctors needed to participate in developing and evaluating algorithms and deciding how these tools should be incorporated into clinical practice. Technology, she argued, should support medical judgement rather than operate separately from it.

“AI will not replace doctors. Doctors who use AI will replace doctors who don’t,” she said.

For AI to improve healthcare, she added, it would be necessary to combine data from different sources and interpret it in ways that are clinically useful. Simply collecting information from multiple devices would not be enough.

This also means ensuring that insights generated by technology can be translated into practical recommendations for patients and doctors. Systems need to account for individual health histories and circumstances rather than treating every change in a measurement as an indication of illness.

The broader goal, Reddy said, was to make healthcare more continuous, with technology connecting the home, workplace and hospital instead of treating them as separate spaces.

Preparing for an ageing population

Reddy also highlighted the need to prepare India’s healthcare system for an ageing population. She said the country would have to pay greater attention to helping older people remain healthy, mobile and independent.

“One concern is sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass and strength that can affect mobility as people age. Identifying declining strength and activity early could help people take steps to preserve their independence,” she said.

Reddy argued that health should be seen not only as a cost to governments and families but also as an investment in social and economic development. “Better health can help people remain active, contribute to the workforce and maintain their quality of life for longer,” she added.

She said growing awareness of health, an increasing burden of disease, and the wider use of digital tools would shape healthcare over the next five years. More people are likely to take an active role in monitoring their health, while providers will need to find ways to use the information available to them.

According to her, the challenge will be to ensure that these developments lead to earlier intervention and better care, rather than simply generating more data.

The reporter attended the Garmin Health Summit in Bangkok at the invitation of Garmin.