The National Health Authority (NHA) and IIT Kanpur have signed a pact for development of digital public goods for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, thereby unlocking the immense potential of this digital tool for improving health outcomes.
Speaking on the occasion, Union Health Secretary Apurva Chandra called it “very important MoU under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission that will provide an open public benchmarking platform for comparing and validating AI models".
Under this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), a federated learning platform across a variety of machine learning model pipelines, a quality-preserving database, an open benchmarking platform for comparing and validating AI models and a consent management system for research under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) would be developed by IIT Kanpur.
The platform will subsequently be operated and governed by the NHA, thereby unlocking the immense potential of AI for improving health outcomes, the Union Health Ministry said in a statement.
Highlighting its importance, Chandra stated that "use of data for improving health outcomes is the envisaged goal of this partnership".
"It will use the data available under the ABDM to create a public benchmark for AI models for quantifying and diagnosing diseases against which other AI models can be benchmarked," he added.
Chandra said "one of the biggest issues related to AI models in the healthcare sector is the availability and efficacy of disease diagnosis data which will be tackled by this collaboration".
"In a clinical setting, the availability of reliable data will lead to better outcomes and result in better diagnosis," he added.
IIT Kanpur Director Professor Manindra Agrawal said "this partnership with the NHA will contribute towards democratizing access to quality healthcare in India".
"Partnering with the NHA, IIT Kanpur aims to create a transformative platform that will empower researchers, healthcare providers and policymakers to unlock the full potential of AI for improving health outcomes in India," he added.
This platform will offer numerous benefits by enabling providers of AI models for healthcare applications to perform genuine out-of-set validation and establish publicly verifiable performance benchmarks. This platform will foster trust in the consumer market for these applications.
