Grounding Digital Health Innovation in Real-World Experience

In a world increasingly reliant on technology, the intersection of healthcare and digital innovation is more crucial than ever. As healthcare systems around the world face mounting pressures from rising patient demands, resource constraints, and the need for more efficient service delivery, the integration of digital tools offers a pathway to enhance outcomes and accessibility. This digital transformation is not just about adopting new tools; it’s about rethinking processes and prioritizing user-centric solutions that address real-world healthcare challenges.

Welcome to "GKII Alumni Spotlights," our exclusive series featuring India-affiliated Johns Hopkins alumni, as they share their experiences, reflections, and insights that shaped their journeys at Hopkins and beyond.

In this edition, we spotlight Dr. Suruchi Gupta, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health graduate and young alumni, who is currently engaged as a Research Scientist on the Exemplars in Digital Health project. Focused on improving healthcare delivery and empowering local health workers, Suruchi shares how a background in medicine can guide meaningful health solutions. In this spotlight, she shares insights from her time at JHU, balancing global health advancements with local needs, and her vision for digital health in India.

What inspired your transition from practicing medicine in India to pursuing digital health research at Johns Hopkins? How has your background as a doctor shaped your approach to health innovation?

Even before pursuing digital health at Johns Hopkins, I was actively conducting public health research in India. My work was centered in improving the quality of service delivery in rural settings, where one of my key interests was capacity building for the public health workforce. With an impending global health workforce shortage, ongoing demographic shift, and the large number of individuals who depend on CHWs for primary care, it is of utmost importance to make their jobs easier for effective service delivery. Furthermore, the need for high-quality and timely health data became abundantly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital health emerged as a promising solution to bridge these gaps and inspired my transition.

At Johns Hopkins, I advanced my understanding of using digital tools to drive health outcomes, especially from a governance and policy perspective which has been critical in shaping my approach. My experiences as a community medicine physician have grounded me in the realities of the last mile and patient care. It has helped me put the user-friendliness, impact, and adaptability of a tool to meet local needs at the heart of innovation.

For every digital intervention I work on, I tend to ask myself, "how does this make citizens' lives easier?" and that focus on practicality has been central to my approach to health innovation.

Reflecting on your time at Johns Hopkins, in what ways did the academic environment shape your understanding of digital health innovations, particularly from a governance and policy perspective?

One of the first things you hear as a student at Hopkins is, "you’ll be spoilt for choice," and that couldn’t be more true. A critical part of shaping your post-Hopkins trajectory is carefully cherry-picking courses that are in alignment with your current expertise while pushing you toward your desired goals. Given my interests in digital health and data, I intentionally chased opportunities that would help me build skill and networks in this space.

With my background in public health program design and implementation, Hopkins gave me a platform to critique my learnings from the field, apply a higher level of rigor and factor in the global political climate in every aspect of my work. My experiences here offered diverse perspectives to the fundamental quest of universal health coverage. With respect to digital, they helped me understand the critical role of factors that are often neglected or seem commonplace- such as gender, infrastructure, or even network connectivity. I realized how much more remains to be done! This awareness of global health challenges, and the inadequacies in our approach to fix them motivated me to use digital tools for healthcare access.

Given the diverse socio-cultural contexts across India, how do you approach the challenge of balancing global health innovations with local realities in your projects?

Adaptability and localization are big themes in digital health. Designing and implementing effective solutions requires a deep understanding of the socio-cultural context and infrastructural readiness of the setting.

This is even more pronounced in India, where the context changes every 50 miles. However, balancing innovation and local realities is not as simple as creating an in-house customizable product. For instance, through my current work studying the drivers of digital adoption in different Indian states, I’ve firsthand seen how the adoption of locally made solutions varies significantly across the country. A common recurring theme is the need for local political commitment, usability, and a clear demonstration of benefits. Meanwhile, my other work in African countries has indicated that even highly customizable digital public goods find it hard to retain users without sufficient training.?

In global health, innovation has often followed an “outside-in” approach, where industrialized countries develop and export them to low- and middle-income countries. However, there is a growing recognition of the need of a “bi-directional flow” to cross-pollinate ideas and knowledge. This would mean creating high-quality products that use sustainable technology and are informed by local reality. To contribute to this, my work focuses on fostering workforce capacity, local ownership and promoting the design and use of adaptable, context-specific innovations.

For students and alumni interested in pursuing a career in public health or digital health, what advice would you give based on your own experiences?

For those with backgrounds like mine, pivoting from medicine to global digital health, I would advise keeping your feet rooted in the field, where health happens, and letting it inform your head, where it is designed.

Your experiences are your strongest asset and will open innumerable doors when complemented with technical skills. While it’s important to build a solid foundation in healthcare, it’s equally crucial to gain expertise in key areas such as design principles, digital transformation, interoperability frameworks, and other core topics.

That said, digital health is genetically interdisciplinary and requires extensive collaboration across sectors—from public health and technology to finance and policy. Therefore, even without a core health skillset, there is something for everybody to build a niche in. Expertise in adjacent fields such as behavioral science, or user experience design are critical in driving impact. The key is to identify your strengths and apply them to fill the gaps in this rapidly evolving space.

What are your thoughts on the future of digital health in India? How do you see your work contributing to this landscape over the next few years?

With the ongoing Digital India movement and initiatives like the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, India is at the forefront of digital transformation in health. The mission has brought together technocrats, private partners and healthcare providers on a level playing field to create use cases that offer clear benefits. There has also been a noticeable shift from reliance on imported innovations, with a growing number of local start-ups now contributing to the market.

The current focus is to create an interoperable healthcare infrastructure, with an emphasis on seamless health information exchange and end-to-end digitization of facilities. This would facilitate access to personalized and real-time care in remote and underserved areas, while being a major step towards universal health coverage.

Looking forward, there is potential to leverage this infrastructure to create an “Amazon of health,” an ecosystem where services like telemedicine, digital prescriptions, ordering diagnostics, and medicine delivery are offered on a unified platform.

My work explores the drivers of health digitization at a policy level, factors that make interventions adoptable by end-users and if efficient, the impact and cost-effectiveness of these interventions. By studying digital across its life cycle, I aim to contribute to the digital health playbook for India and identify the do’s and don’ts for sustainable transformation. Going forwards, I plan to go back to my roots and focus more on digital for workforce capacity and sustainable financing for health systems.

Gupta-Klinsky India Institute is a JHU-wide initiative bringing together the best of the Johns Hopkins community?to address some of the complex India-specific issues through our shared expertise in research, education, policy, and practice.?Our current efforts are rooted in a century-old legacy of rich collaborations between the JHU community and India.

In 2024, we launched a first-of-its-kind effort to consolidate a community of JHU alumni from India, those currently working or based in the country, as well as those who are part of the Indian diaspora. The goal is to mobilize a community of thousands of Johns Hopkins alumni with multidisciplinary backgrounds and a collective vision to deepen the relationship between Johns Hopkins and India.

If you are a Johns Hopkins alum from India, currently based in India, or belong to the Indian diaspora, please take a moment to fill out our short online survey.

Stay connected with us for more inspiring stories from the India-affiliated JHU alumni community by subscribing to our biweekly alumni spotlight series and visiting our JHU India Alumni webpage.