Global Headwinds Driving The Need For Innovations In A Unique Way: Baxter's Sanchita Basu

How is Baxter contributing to strengthening the healthcare sector in India?

Baxter is committed to supporting patients and healthcare professionals with innovations that are driven by compassion for their journeys, a passion to improve care and the ambition to transform the future of healthcare.

Baxter India is committed to its mission of saving and sustaining lives by fostering excellence across technology, manufacturing, R&D, and commercial operations.

Through our commercial presence in India for more than 25 years, we are providing a diverse portfolio of products that support critical care, hospital care, nutritional care, renal care, and surgical care specialties throughout the healthcare system.

Global Technology Capability Center, Bengaluru: Provides enterprise-wide next-gen tech solutions to enable the digital acceleration of Baxter businesses around the centre also provides data analytics and data science, automation, Agile solution delivery, and programme management across IT capabilities, supporting manufacturing, supply chain, operations, and global functions. It supports all of Baxter’s global infrastructure and applications, along with a globally distributed team. The talent hub is strategically located to provide holistic governance and process standardisations to the global, APAC, and Indian markets.

The Bengaluru R&D Center has made significant contributions to Baxter's global efforts to improve clinical outcomes and efficiencies through product and digital innovation. The Bengaluru R&D center enables Baxter to have a deep understanding of customer needs and emerging market trends and develop high quality products that cater to patients across the world.

R&D Center, Ahmedabad: As a part of our expansion strategy in India, we recently launched a global pharmaceuticals R&D Centre in Ahmedabad that will help accelerate innovation in the generic and differentiated injectable pharmaceuticals space. It will support Baxter's global manufacturing facilities, including those in Ahmedabad, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the United States, among others.

The generic injectables manufacturing facility in Ahmedabad has successfully completed five years of strong presence in India. The Baxter Ahmedabad facility is a cutting-edge generic injectables manufacturing facility that produces essential generic medicines with complementary strengths in anesthesia, analgesics, critical care, renal medicines, and anti-infectives in a variety of packaging formats such as vials, ampoules, and bags. The Ahmedabad facility exports world-class products to many countries.

Everything we do converges at the critical intersection where products that save and sustain lives meet the healthcare professionals and caregivers who make it all happen. By drawing on our many years of experience in the healthcare industry, we will keep providing solutions that will significantly support India's healthcare system. To improve the clinical outcomes of patients across the country, we are dedicated to collaborating with patients, healthcare professionals, government, and healthcare organizations.

What are the primary factors that make India the preferred global IT hub?

In India, technology is the primary driver of growth across all industries, and the young talent pool in this field is our greatest competitive edge. The India market has several distinguishing characteristics compared to other geolocations, such as a large and young workforce, affordable education, the government's emphasis on skill development, incentives to stimulate corporate growth and entrepreneurship, and cost-effectiveness. This would allow us to satisfy the future worldwide need for talent in this field and transform Baxter Global IT into a strategic location hub.

Could you elaborate on the Baxter Global IT Centre in India? How large is the organization?

Baxter’s Global Technology Capability Center, based in Bengaluru, India, is the second largest IT employee base after Deerfield, partnering and delivering some of the most strategic global and regional technology initiatives. 

The journey started in 2014 and has grown into a workforce of more than 700 technology experts. This technology Center of Excellence (COE) in India strategically responds to drivers of change and is emerging as a powerful value creator in technology adoption through rapidly evolving business scenarios.

It enables Baxter’s north star vision of digital transformation by driving data, insights, and deep partnerships to advance our mission of saving and sustaining lives and serve our customers and patients better. Design thinking and agility lead the priority list to accelerate global enterprises' innovation and digital modernization. 

With this, goals are focused on lowering operating costs, incubating digital capabilities, leading and owning business outcomes, and driving innovation initiatives. The centre is also partnering across initiatives for employees and customers while driving the business in the right direction.

Baxter's Global IT Centre in India continues to support all of Baxter’s global infrastructure and applications with a globally distributed team, covering all global time zones. Such collaboration brings scale and agility while harnessing data, the cloud, AI, mobile applications, and automation to power our operating model.

What is your role at Baxter?

I play the role of site leader for Bengaluru at Baxter Global IT. It encompasses the overall strategy and management of the centre, building and adjusting services based on the changing demands of our different businesses, supporting the growth and development of our India-based workforce, continuing to build digital capabilities aligned with our global strategy, and driving the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategy within India.

How have you contributed to the global digital transformation of Baxter, particularly after the pandemic?

With the pandemic driving borderless innovation, we quickly changed to the new normal, becoming "co-creators and co-innovators" in digital transformation and innovation. Change is the only constant, and we continue to evolve, learn, and progress on our digital health initiatives. We have strategic multi-program initiatives that are being implemented with the objective of delivering value to employees and customers while driving our business forward. We continue to build our technology platforms on a modern, modular, and secure technology architecture that enables scale and agility in a post pandemic operating model.

What challenges do you think the MedTech industry faces right now, especially when it comes to technology?

The global economy is witnessing a major headwind due to global supply chain challenges, geo-political situations, and other macro-economic factors. This is an unprecedented trend, with many factors coming together along with the rapid change in customer behaviors. It is driving us to rethink the need for innovations in a unique way and explore ways to bring value to our customers and patients. Since healthcare touches humans in so many ways, it is one of the most complex sectors. Because of how the economy is changing, more attention and reliance are put on technology to meet these difficult business needs.

Healthtech solutions have the potential to be the next disruptors, but they must be balanced within our sphere of regulated and secured policies and boundaries. The main consideration for the future in a med-tech world with new economic changes will be to deeply understand consumer taxonomies, connect care devices, harness data, and bring insights and innovation from new technologies. Hence, the right shift would not only be to have the latest technology but also one that can improve the total cost of care and clinical impact.

Do you believe AI and ML can revolutionize the medical device industry? Please share your perspective.

As per the market analysis, the global artificial intelligence in healthcare market was valued at USD 15 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 38% from 2023 to 2030. It is a huge shift from what we are seeing today in this industry. The primary driver of such inorganic growth is the increasing connectivity of devices to the internet, which generates massive amounts of data, emphasising the importance of trusted and secure AI and ML solutions. In my perspective, this is a huge opportunity in our industry to invest in value-add use cases and implement "AI for Good" solutions on massive treatment and therapy datasets to create a positive impact in this regulated business.

What is your take on the focus on Healthcare and technology in Budget 2023?

We welcome the 2023-24 budget announcement by Union Finance Minister, which comes with a clear focus on encouraging technological development by the pharmaceuticals industry and promotion of innovation and medical research both by the private and public sectors.

Digital India is one of the key imperatives for strengthening the building blocks of future India. The Indian government's emphasis on both digital and healthcare spending, in my opinion, is providing the right impetus for encouraging innovation and skill development in this health-tech adoption through availability and affordability.