Events 
NCAER’s Centre for Health Economics (CHE) together with PATH, convened the 16th Future Trends Forum in New Delhi on 1–2 September 2026. This two-day regional forum brought together leaders from government, industry, international organizations, and global health experts from 10 countries — India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Egypt, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates — to discuss how sustained investments can build more resilient, equitable, and future-ready health systems. This was CHE’s seminal event and provided a basis for translating key dialogue into potential areas of policy research.
Discussions spanned three themes: sustainable healthcare financing, AI-driven health systems, and cross-sector collaboration. In his inaugural address, Mr. Deepak Sood, Whole Time Member (Non-Life), Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), highlighted India’s “missing middle” — a population that falls outside government health schemes, yet unable to afford adequate private insurance — as an important focus for policy attention.
NCAER’s Director General, Mr. Suresh Goyal, underscored CHE’s role in convening regional ministries of health, policy makers, multilateral health and economists, and industry stakeholders to inform policy-relevant research in the arena of health economics.
Ms. Nisha Gupta, Director of the Centre for Health Economics, emphasized combining best practices across the region to tailor solutions for sustainable health care financing, highlighting that the challenge in translating investments into measurable public health outcomes is increasingly becoming an issue of institutional capacity, rather than the availability of resources.
