The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is driving transformative changes in the public health sector through the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies. AIIMS Delhi, PGIMER Chandigarh, and AIIMS Rishikesh have been designated as Centres of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence to promote the development and use of AI-based solutions in healthcare. Several AI innovations have been deployed to enhance public health services, including the Clinical Decision Support System, Media Disease Surveillance Solution, Diabetic Retinopathy Identification Solution, and Abnormal Chest X-Ray Classifier Model, with more in early stages of development.
The AI-powered Media Disease Surveillance tool, operational since April 2022, scans digital news sources nationwide to support event-based surveillance for infectious diseases. It has generated over 4,500 alerts, enabling timely prevention and mitigation of disease outbreaks and reducing mortality and morbidity rates.
The Clinical Decision Support System has been integrated into e-Sanjeevani, the national telemedicine platform, to enhance consultation quality. The system streamlines patient complaint entries and provides AI-based differential diagnosis recommendations. Since its implementation, 196 million e-Sanjeevani consultations have benefitted from standardized data capture, while 12 million consultations have utilized AI-recommended diagnoses, aiding doctors in informed decision-making.
Under the Tuberculosis elimination program, the Cough Against TB AI solution is being used for pulmonary TB screening in community settings, identifying additional cases that conventional methods might miss. This solution has shown an additional yield of 12 to 16 percent in TB reporting. Another AI solution, Prediction of Adverse TB Outcomes, predicts the likelihood of adverse outcomes in TB patients upon treatment initiation. Following its deployment, adverse outcomes have declined by 27 percent.
These measures highlight the government’s commitment to leveraging artificial intelligence to strengthen public health systems and improve health outcomes across the country.
