Oversize #2: Microsoft’s long health play in India

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Editor's note: The business casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic are many in India: travel, hospitality, lending, food delivery, media, etc. But one industry that will see a revolution of a different sort is healthcare—the pandemic has accelerated interest in digital health, from telemedicine to machine learning. One of the best positioned to take advantage of this shift is Microsoft, across both its cloud offerings and its software-as-a-service tools. To take an immediate example, consider telemedicine. Virtual consultations with doctors have for long been in a regulatory grey area in India; there were no rules specific to teleconsultation, and hospitals have avoided it, especially in the wake of a 2018 Bombay high court judgement against a pair of doctors for medical negligence for advice given over the phone. Although several health-tech startups like Practo and Lybrate have had doctors offer teleconsultation in recent years, there was no statutory basis or support. This changed with the pandemic, and the Medical Council of India on 25 March (a day after the government announced a national lockdown) published the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines, clearing teleconsultation and specifying …