At the IIMA Healthcare Summit 2026 in Ahmedabad, the push was to move India from being the ‘pharmacy of the world’ to the ‘laboratory of the world,’ centering research, innovation, and artificial intelligence in healthcare.

The event unveiled India Pharma Archives, a living digital archive chronicling the country’s pharma evolution, along with a book detailing India’s COVID-19 vaccine journey.

Officials stressed multi-stakeholder collaboration among government, industry, and academia to build a robust national AI ecosystem for healthcare.

Acknowledge ongoing challenges: uneven healthcare access due to geography, shortage of specialists and advanced diagnostics, and the dual burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases.

AI is seen as a bridge to improve access, reduce geographic disparities, and combat the dual disease burden.

The India Pharma Archives are designed as a living resource, freely accessible to students, researchers, policymakers, historians, and industry leaders.

The archive will host company histories, archival materials, films, interviews, timelines, and advanced search tools to support ongoing research and collaboration.

The initiative builds on The Alchemy of Cure and aims to expand institutional memory beyond a static gallery through broad accessibility and continuous growth.

There is a strong emphasis on accessible healthcare and genetic data with safeguards, highlighting AI’s role in clinical trials, precision medicine, and digitization of patient data.

Government plans to make health and genetic data accessible to innovators with safeguards, reinforcing AI’s potential in trials, precision medicine, and data digitization.

Leaders underscored the importance of accessible genetic and healthcare data, safeguarded, with AI-driven gains in clinical trials and precision medicine.

Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is building a robust digital health ecosystem, with tens of crores of ABHA IDs and billions of linked health records, plus AI-enabled disease detection and decision-support tools like eSanjeevani.