‘NCDC’s AI tool helped issue over 5,000 alerts’

 

 

 

AN ARTIFICIAL Intelligence tool deployed by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in 2022 may have helped issue more than 5,000 alerts of infectious outbreaks to health authorities in real-time since installation, according to a study. Developed by WadhwaniAI, a New Delhi-based healthcare AI solutions provider, the ‘Health Sentinel’ tool could have helped slash 98 per cent of manual workload, enabling a quicker detection of an outbreak and proactive public health response, findings published as a pre-print paper and yet to be peer-reviewed suggest. Nearly 200 countries are legally bound by the International Health Regulations (IHR) to operate a national disease surveillance system.

 

The IHR and World Health Organisation work together in protecting global health security. News reports in print, electronic and online media are scanned by media scanning and verification tool under India’s ‘Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme’ (IDSP) for unusual health events, which are then shared with authorities for further action, if deemed necessary. ‘Health Sentinel’ scanned media reports and news articles everyday in 13 languages. The authors wrote, “From April 2022 till date, Health Sentinel has processed over 300 million news articles and identified over 95,000 unique health events across India of which over 3,500 events (four per cent) were shortlisted by the public health experts at NCDC as potential outbreaks.”

 

Authors from Wadhwani AI told PTI that between April 2022 and April 2025, more than 5,000 real-time alerts have been sent to health authorities across India. “Traditionally, the process of identifying potential disease events reported in the media involved manual scanning of newspapers, journals, and reports to identify relevant articles,” Parag Govil, national program lead for global health security at Wadhwani AI, told PTI. “Introducing the ‘Health Sentinel’ solution has replaced this manual process while retaining a human-in-the-loop approach where epidemiologists perform essential verification before the information is disseminated to state and district officials,” he added.

 

Traditional approaches in disease surveillance rely on ‘passive reporting’ in which reports of infections from physicians and healthcare providers are looked at. Monitoring informal sources such as online media has also become increasingly popular for disease surveillance, but as volume of articles published everyday has increased, manual workload of screening media has ballooned up and is impractical, the study’s authors said, including those from the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). They proposed the ‘Health Sentinel’ tool that makes use of AI to extract information on unusual health events or outbreaks from news articles.