In a significant boost to India's public health infrastructure, an artificial intelligence tool deployed by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has potentially issued more than 5,000 real-time alerts for infectious disease outbreaks to health authorities across the country since its installation in 2022. This groundbreaking development promises a faster, more efficient response to potential health crises.
Revolutionizing Disease Surveillance with AI
The AI tool, named 'Health Sentinel,' was developed by WadhwaniAI, a New Delhi-based healthcare AI solutions provider. According to a pre-print study that is yet to be peer-reviewed, this system could have slashed the manual workload by a staggering 98 per cent. This automation has enabled quicker outbreak detection and a more proactive public health response, moving away from traditional, slower methods.
India's 'Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme' (IDSP) traditionally relies on scanning print, electronic, and online media for reports of unusual health events. Parag Govil, national program lead for global health security at Wadhwani AI, explained to PTI that the manual process of scanning newspapers, journals, and reports has now been replaced by the 'Health Sentinel' solution. The system retains a crucial human-in-the-loop approach, where epidemiologists perform essential verification before information is sent to state and district officials.
Massive Scale and Multilingual Capability
The scale of the AI's operation is immense. The authors of the study noted that from April 2022 till date, Health Sentinel has processed over 300 million news articles in 13 different languages. From this vast amount of data, it identified over 95,000 unique health events across India. Public health experts at the NCDC subsequently shortlisted over 3,500 of these events (four per cent) as potential outbreaks requiring attention.
The research team observed a 150 per cent increase in published events since 2022 compared to previous years of human-based surveillance. In a telling statistic from 2024, a remarkable 96 per cent of the health events published by the national surveillance system were extracted by the AI tool, with only four per cent found through manual media scanning.
Context and Supporting Evidence
This initiative aligns with the International Health Regulations (IHR), which legally bind nearly 200 countries, including India, to operate a national disease surveillance system. The shift towards augmenting traditional passive reporting from physicians with event-based surveillance from online sources is gaining global traction.
A separate pilot study in Kerala's Kasaragod district, published in the 'Indian Journal of Medical Research,' demonstrated the effectiveness of such systems. By analyzing media, rumour registers, and patient records for acute febrile illness, researchers identified 88 clusters, with ten verified as events and nine classified as outbreaks, including dengue and COVID-19.
Further validating this approach, a 2020 review in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics of 148 research articles concluded that the inclusion of online data in surveillance systems has improved disease prediction ability over traditional systems. Another 2017 study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene highlighted how news article data can help overcome delays in obtaining official country-level data on infections like dengue.
The deployment of 'Health Sentinel' marks a pivotal step in India's journey towards leveraging technology for robust and timely public health protection, ensuring the nation is better prepared to identify and respond to emerging health threats.
