Analytics to enable real-time disease surveillance: Accenture

Disruptive technologies like analytics and big data can enable real-time-surveillance of disease outbreaks in India thereby giving a head start to authorities to check them from spreading, Accenture says.
According to the firm's report, 'Delivering e-Health in India - Analysis and Recommendations', such initiatives and practices will lower real-time-surveillance costs and time-to-reaction leading to not only economic savings, but a much more efficient outbreak intervention mechanism.
The report said although, India's size, diversity and increasing significance to international transportation create considerable opportunities for infectious outbreaks, local approaches to surveillance resemble those of many communities around the world.
There are more than 30 diseases, which have been declared notifiable in India, ranging from common pathogens like Salmonella to potentially disastrous like Small Pox, it added.

Presently, notification system is mostly paper based, with Primary Health Centres and District Hospitals sharing information with the Public Health Authorities on a periodic basis, it said.
"The biggest lacuna in this system is the involvement of private healthcare providers. While, big private hospitals do have systems in place to notify these diseases to appropriate authorities, the smaller players, especially individual practitioners, which form a majority of private providers, do not have any involvement in a notification system," it added.

The report said there have been some efforts, albeit on a limited scale, to use online/computer based systems to improve time-to-notification, these have not involved players outside the government ambit.

The most significant effort made at a country wide level is the Integrated Disease Surveillance Project (IDSP) funded partly by the World Bank and run by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Accenture's report suggests using middleware to integrate disparate data sources.
"This aims to integrate various data collections systems. It examines aggregate and de-identified data routinely collected by clinical and other information systems automatically and in real time for trends and anomalies suggestive of disease outbreaks," it added.
The report also said that the use of pre-diagnostic data, syndromic surveillance, aims to provide a timelier identification of disease outbreaks than can be attained through traditional surveillance methods.

Syndromic surveillance could be applied to detect serious but low-frequency threats such as bio-terror attacks, SARS, or avian influenza in time to contain their further spread.
According to analysts, healthcare market in India is about USD 80 billion, and is expected to grow by 15-20 per cent in the next decade.
The private and public sector had spend about Rs 5,700 crore on IT component of healthcare in 2013-14, it is estimated.