India needs national common health dataset to create AI models: VK Paul

Former NITI Aayog member VK Paul said India needs a common health dataset and stronger primary healthcare systems to tackle rising non-communicable diseases

India needs to create a national common health dataset where privacy-protected data is available in anonymised form for the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in health systems, said Dr VK Paul, former member of policy think tank NITI Aayog.

 

“There is a lot of scope in predicting risk of outbreaks, precision medication and disease surveillance. However, data remains a challenge, as it is fragmented, duplicated and rests in silos,” Paul said at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII’s) Annual Business Summit in New Delhi.

 

He added that such a step will help bring different datasets together for use in new AI models in public health. However, he said such models and their use cases must be validated at technical, clinical and health levels.

 

Paul added that strengthening the primary healthcare structure as a future-ready system needs to be India’s first priority in order to tackle non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and achieve India’s target of healthy life expectancy by 2047.

 

He stressed that secondary prevention of NCDs such as cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, diabetes, fatty liver-related issues and mental health conditions need to be pushed through primary healthcare systems.

 

NCDs are estimated to account for 63 per cent of all deaths, making them the leading causes of death in India, according to data from the Union Health Ministry.

 

The increasing burden of such diseases, he added, needs to be managed through more than 185,000 Ayushman Arogya Mandirs (AAMs) built under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY).

 

“This will help in detecting diseases early and then managing them through lifestyle changes and therapies in the early stages, as the case may be,” Paul said.

 

Paul also stressed the need to build a strong pipeline for family welfare as a medical specialty to address the growing needs of chronic disease patients in India.

 

“While we have increased the number of medical seats, the space for general practice and family medicine is shrinking. However, there is a need to reimagine medical training," he added.

 

He added that it is difficult to compress all competencies needed for care that demands continuity, second-line treatment, monitoring, follow-up and further control into five-and-a-half years of MBBS training.

 

Highlighting that there are only 5,000 MD-level family medicine doctors (0.36 doctors per 100,000 people), Paul said India needs to create future doctors who can treat everyone from children to the geriatric population, which is currently scattered across paediatrics, internal medicine and community medicine.