KATHMANDU, FEBRUARY 11
For as long as I can remember, I have been curious about technology. Not as a gadget, but as a tool. A tool that, when used right, can reduce human error, save time, and, most importantly, improve outcomes.
My real immersion into artificial intelligence did not begin in a lab or a conference hall. It began at home, through conversations with my son. Watching how naturally his generation interacts with technology made one thing clear. AI is not the future. It is already here. The real question is how we choose to use it.
Like many curious professionals, I started experimenting on my own. Platforms like Replit opened doors, but they also revealed limitations. Vision alone is not enough. To build something meaningful, you need collaborators who understand both technology and real-world problems.
That turning point came in May, during a visit to Boston. Conversations with software engineers Baibhav Thapa and Mamta Sonwalkar made something click. I spoke about the daily inefficiencies I see in clinics. Repetitive paperwork. Fragmented records. Missed follow-ups. Communication gaps between patient, clinician, and system. They spoke the language of code. I spoke the language of care. Somewhere in between, a shared vision emerged.
Later that year, at the Harvard Global Symposium on AI in Healthcare, that vision matured. Presenting and interacting at the intersection of Kolti and Kendall Square was symbolic. One foot in clinical reality, the other in global innovation. Conversations with deans, professors, and researchers reinforced a simple truth. The biggest healthcare problems are not about lack of intelligence. They are about lack of integration.
Healthcare today suffers from broken continuity. A patient's story gets told repeatedly. Data sits in silos. Decisions depend heavily on memory, time, and fatigue. AI's real promise is not diagnosis alone. It is structured. It listens patiently. It records consistently. It flags what is missing. It supports, but does not replace, clinical judgement.
From those discussions emerged a practical idea. An AI-assisted companion that helps capture patient history, organise records, suggest evidence-based pathways, and improve communication. Not a replacement for doctors, but a quiet assistant working in the background. We began implementing this on the ground in Nepal, within real clinics, with real patients, and real constraints.
That phase taught us humility. Technology behaves differently outside demo environments. Internet reliability, workflow habits, language diversity, and regulatory uncertainty all matter. But it also taught us optimism. Even small AI-driven improvements can significantly reduce waiting times, improve documentation quality, and allow clinicians to focus on what matters most. The patient is sitting in front of them.
Today, our challenges are no longer technical alone. Scaling requires policy support. Interoperability requires standards. Ethical deployment requires oversight. For AI to truly benefit Nepal's healthcare system, it cannot remain fragmented across individual clinics or startups.
There is a strong case for national collaboration. Integrating AI-assisted health records with systems like the National ID could transform continuity of care, especially in a country where patients often move between cities, clinics, and even countries. With the right safeguards, anonymisation, and governance, such integration could improve public health planning, emergency care, and long-term disease monitoring.
This is where government agencies, INGOs, academic institutions, and private innovators must come together. Not as competitors, but as co-builders of a system that serves people first.
AI will not replace doctors. It will replace inefficiency. It will not remove empathy. It will create space for it. In a country like Nepal, where resources are limited but intent is strong, AI can become the bridge that fills gaps in care, not by being louder, but by being smarter.
The wisdom to heal has always existed. Technology simply gives us a better way to listen.
Dr Neil Pande is a Kathmandu-based dental surgeon with nearly three decades of clinical experience and an early adopter of digital dentistry.
