Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:06]
Hello, and welcome back to the HFS GCC Advantage. This is a series where we speak with GCC leaders and industry practitioners on how the model is evolving and what it takes to stay relevant in a more AI-led, software-driven world. Over the last few years, we have seen GCCs move well beyond traditional roles and increasingly become drivers of enterprise outcomes, innovation, and product ownership. And nowhere is this shift more visible than in industries like healthcare, where technology, patient outcomes, and innovation are becoming deeply interconnected. To talk more about this, I’m joined by Arvind Vaishnav, head of Philips Innovation Campus. Welcome to HFS GCC Advantage, Arvind.
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[00:48]
Very nice to be here, Achyuta, and thanks for letting me here.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:54]
Thank you. Pleasure is all ours. So, quickly getting into the discussion flow, Arvind, before we get into the campus itself and what it does, can you give a quick overview of where Philips is today, especially with its focus on healthcare and how that shapes the kind of work that you do, along with your career background and current roles and responsibilities that you have?
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[00:54]
Yeah, no, so I’ll start with, Philips is a more than 130-year-old company. We have been serving consumers. We have been serving our healthcare professionals. We have been serving patients for all these years. But in the most recent times, Philips has evolved into a health technology leader, which is focused on improving lives through meaningful innovation, with a specific emphasis on improving the patient-centric solutions and clinical healthcare solutions, and also focusing on consumer health and well-being. Our focus has been in this journey: how could we have a better impact, a better care for our patients, and how could we assist the clinicians in providing better delivery of care to their patients, and similarly, a better experience for our consumers who use different products from Philips, such as grooming products or oral products, and so on.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[02:09]
OK. So I think that’s a helpful context, because it really sets up the role that the Innovation Campus plays within the overall broader enterprise of Philips, right? So, if you look at the Philips Innovation Campus today, how has it evolved over a period of time, from a basic capability center to what it is today, and what are the key enterprise outcomes that you are expected to drive? You want to know more about what has changed in the last few years, what does enterprise impact mean from a Philips Innovation Campus viewpoint, and how different is what you are asked to do today versus what you were asked to do earlier?
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[02:49]
So our campus has been in Bangalore for more than 30 years. It is one of the largest innovation hubs for Philips, and it is known for software and AI capabilities in the healthcare domain. We are roughly about 4000 people across different businesses and enterprise functions. I would say that over the last these many years, the campus has evolved quite a lot, and come to a position where we are adding significant value to our stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, and consumers. And this evolution has happened through a conscious working across the entire value chain to create value and impact for our clinicians, patients, and consumers. I keep on saying this again and again because as a campus, it is very important for us to align with the larger purpose of Philips, which is about touching 2.5 billion lives by 2030 or 2 billion lives by 2025. That’s the larger purpose of Philips, and obviously from that culture and from that purpose, the center is working towards innovating healthcare solutions which create value for patients, clinicians, and impact. One of the important changes that has happened in the last 4 or 5 years is our focus has dramatically shifted towards value creation. Especially when we talk about value creation, I’m talking about what’s the functional value. So as an example, if you take clinicians, what’s the functional value they get when they use Philips products and solutions? Then we’re talking about the economic value, and then finally, the social value. And then around these, to deliver these values, we build certain capabilities which are required, such as the clinical and the technical aspects which are needed to deliver that value or the impact that we are talking about. Among all of this, an important element is patient safety and quality. So that’s another area of being in the healthcare domain. We can’t be shying away from building the capabilities in patient safety and quality. It is the most important aspect. It is the principle. It is a mantra. Philips is known for its quality of the products, quality of the solutions, and that we continue to live. So if you look at it from a PIC — in short, for Philips Innovation Campus — we have more focused ourselves on creating impact. We talk of outcomes in terms of solving challenges, solving clinical challenges in the most precise form, improve quality of care, give more time to clinicians so that they can spend more time with their patients. And at the same time, it should be quality care for the patients at a less time. So I think those are the areas where we have put in an emphasis, and we put guardrails and thought process across the 4000 people so that we all think in one direction and bring value from the campus for the three most important stakeholders that I talked about.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[05:35]
Can you share some examples, Arvind, to make this a little bit more real? In terms of when you say value for your customer’s customer or your enterprise’s customer, how are you doing that from the campus?
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[06:13]
So I’ll give you one of the examples. Within magnetic resonance imaging — in short, it is called an MRI — I’m sure people would have seen it or experienced it at some point in time, or if not people, their family members. What typically happens is when you do an MRI scan, it takes roughly about an hour for the scan to complete — call it a brain scan, or head or neck scan, or whatever. It takes about an hour to complete the scan in a traditional setup. Now, the center here delivers 100% of the software for that MRI machine which is sold globally. Now what happens is the team here worked on a very unique technology built on AI. It is called the SmartSpeed MR. What the SmartSpeed MR does, it reduces the scan time by 15%. So that means, depending on a body part, if the scan takes an hour, the SmartSpeed MR reduces it by 50%. Now, in the context of economic value, of course, the patient has to spend just 30 minutes less. Otherwise they have to spend more time in a hospital or a clinic. So that’s a value for them. It’s a functional value for the clinicians because now, by scanning just for 30 minutes, they can do more number of patients. And when they do more number of patients, they create access for the same technology for a larger number of people. And when you do that, you have a social impact that you created. So you just notice that with one example, reducing the scan time from 1 hour to 30 minutes, I have the economic value, I have the functional value, and I have the social value, all get delivered in one perspective. Similarly, let me take another example. Ultrasound is very important, a first-line diagnostic within the healthcare space, right? Typically when the ultrasound scan is done, the image is acquired for about 10 to 15 minutes, but most of the time goes in doing the measurements, doing the reporting, capturing the images, and doing everything which is required to diagnose that image from a diagnostic perspective. Now, with the simplification of software, and also with AI coming into the technology, we have shortened this time of taking the measurements by automating the measurements. We have also shortened time in terms of making the products much more aligned into the workflow of the clinician, so that overall time taken by the patient, right from taking the images to getting the report and going home, has been drastically reduced. So those are two such examples, but there are many such examples where we work together with clinicians just on the three things, and the measurement of this is really in terms of what is the functional impact, what is the economic impact, and what is the social. I hope these two examples provide you where we are trying to think and what is the approach we are trying to take.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[09:12]
Absolutely. I think, just by halving the MRI time, you’ve actually doubled the productivity. So that’s a huge boost that you see. So, as the role of the campus evolves, the obvious question is what happens to the people and skills who are actually making it happen, right? So to deliver on the shift, what changes have you had to make in terms of talent and skills? Who are you hiring or building for today that you wouldn’t have been hiring in the past? I mean, what skills are becoming more important? What are becoming less relevant? How are you approaching the entire upskilling, reskilling process internally? I think if you could expand a bit on that.
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[09:59]
Yeah, let me directly just give you a little bit more context of healthcare, and you will recognize that you must have been hearing this also from various forums. So, healthcare is becoming more and more complex. The demand for better healthcare is increasing, and it’s largely because of also one of the facts that the chronic diseases continue to increase, the aging population, and whatnot, right? So when healthcare starts to get more complex, I would rather, as a healthcare provider, focus on looking at the end-to-end chain of the healthcare delivery. What it means is when I have to create an end-to-end solution for our customers, consumers, and patients, I have to look at the entire value chain of healthcare, how it is delivered. And one of the most important things, you know, Achyuta, for delivering an impact across the value chain is to really understand where the chain starts and where does it end. In terms of healthcare, I call it as mapping the clinicians’ and the patient journey. So while we are talking about upskilling and adding new roles, I always place emphasis that we need to build end-to-end capabilities in our organization. And when we look at that, in the last couple of years, we have put a lot of efforts on building the clinical and the product roles. These are very unique roles. They are able to understand what’s the patient and clinical journey across the care path. The care path for a cardiac care could be different. Oncology care path is completely different, right? Or the neurology care path is completely different. So people with domain knowledge, people with an understanding of the product, and how should that translate into what we want to deliver to our patients and clinicians is very important. So irrespective of where we stand today, we have continuously pushed our boundaries in hiring such kind of folks. The other area is, as I touched upon this, healthcare is a very regulated environment, we all know it. So it’s really to keep the emphasis on the design, safety, and quality of the product. At every step of a healthcare chain, we cannot keep ourselves out of the value chain and think that the safety and quality can be different. It’s a very, very critical element for us. So we have consciously made efforts in building more of the quality roles and the person who looks at the entire chain with that lens. The third and last and final one that I’m seeing the major shift with, given the challenges of healthcare that I talked about — aging population, chronic diseases, etc. — is the digital capabilities. So AI is the latest thing, and so both AI and cloud are our key focus areas, and we are building our capabilities. We are actually also looking at the ways of working, how they will evolve as AI becomes an integral part of our delivery value chain, right? And this is going to happen across the value chain. So while we look at that portion, we also look at the conscious efforts on how do we upskill our people, how do we bring the joint forces and just not look at one siloed portion of the healthcare, but look at the entire value chain. Because when you go into a hospital, you don’t just look at one thing — you also look at the informatics play, what’s your experience in the hospital with diagnostics, what’s your experience with the consultation with the clinicians, or when you’re in an ICU, when a patient is in the intensive care, it has another perspective. So what I’m trying to tell you is that we have laid emphasis on more end-to-end value and end-to-end mapping of the journey, both from a clinician’s and the patient’s standpoint. Which is where we are trying to drive the major change, and the workflow is so complex, Achyuta, within the healthcare setup, and you probably know that, the simplification of healthcare is the word, especially to deal with the larger patient volumes and the fatigue that our clinicians have.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[14:08]
Sure. I understand. I think it’s a great domain and emerging tech story. Moving on, and beyond internal capability, I think it’s also how you work with the broader ecosystem, right? So a lot of this innovation does not happen in isolation internally. So how are you looking at ecosystem partnerships with startups, academia, technology partners to accelerate innovations done from the campus?
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[14:24]
Yeah, so today, if you see, it’s very important to have a partnership with our care providers because, you know, healthcare is very heavily dependent on the workflow. The workflow that exists in our country will be different from the rest of the country. We are a global innovation hub. We need to understand and partner with our clinical partners who then work with us and say what fits in that workflow and how it will improve that capability. So for us, among the three areas that you talked about — the startup, academia, and clinical partnership — Philips has a major role, and we work very closely with our clinical partners across the world. Our teams are regularly working with the clinical partners. Most of the time clinicians come to our campus. They also work in our lab environment. They also guide our people who are there in the office, as well as our engineers, to really understand what’s changing and how it will make an impact. That is one part of it. The other part of it is working with academia. It is very important because the chain is so complex. If I take up the imaging modalities, we are talking about image acquisition to image processing, and finally we’re giving it the diagnostic report, right? So this whole chain is so complex that we are looking at more talented people from the Indian ecosystem, especially the academia.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[15:53]
Right. And my last question, I know we’re over here, we’re out of time, but as you look forward, right? AI is becoming more and more critical. You touched upon it also. So, how do you see AI change healthcare innovation for Philips specifically, the top two or three areas, and what really excites you about this new phase?
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[16:13]
So I think what it will change from a healthcare perspective is — and we believe, and I also touched upon a little bit — the clinicians should get more time with the patients rather than spending time with the technology. So that’s the number one criteria that we apply ourselves. The second one is it should make the quality care for patients. It should make it simple. It should make it more accessible for them. So that’s from a patient standpoint. And when I’m talking about healthcare all through, I need to also talk about that we have a personal health business, which is the shavers and the oral care and others, which are a very important part of our personal hygiene. And so, you know, we work on those solutions which are heavily towards improving the patient experience. So the design of the product, the way the software and the AI gets integrated into the workflow, is a very essential element, and I think that’s the lens which will change as we come along, and it will have a major impact on the positive side of the impact for our patients and consumers.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[17:17]
Thank you, Arvind. I think what really stands out is how the role of the India center, the GCC, is evolving from supporting enterprise functions to shaping enterprise outcomes directly. I think that’s the story of the Philips Innovation Campus, and in sectors like healthcare where technology can have a real impact on patients and clinicians, this is quite strong, quite meaningful. Arvind, thank you for joining us and sharing these insights. And viewers, stay tuned for the next episode of the HFS GCC Advantage.
Arvind Vaishnav — Head, Philips Innovation Campus[17:33]
Thank you for inviting me here. Thank you, Achyuta. Thank you.
