Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The National Health Authority (NHA) on September 11 announced a partnership with the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Kanpur to revolutionise artificial intelligence (AI) in health research.
As part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), IIT Kanpur will develop a federated learning platform across a variety of machine learning model pipelines, a quality-preserving database, and an open benchmarking platform for comparing and validating AI models.
The institute will also create a consent management system for research under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM).
“This very important MoU under the ABDM will provide an open public benchmarking platform for comparing and validating AI models,” said Apurva Chandra, Union Health Secretary. The platform will be operated and governed by NHA and use the data for improving health outcomes in the country.
“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,” Chandra said.
Chandra added that 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.”
Launched in September 2021, ABDM aims to establish a robust digital health ecosystem and integrate various healthcare entities — hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmacies, health insurance companies, and more — to improve patient care, accessibility, and affordability.