The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay announced end of last week that it has set up the Koita Centre for Digital Health, with the support of a "generous contribution" from non-profit organisation Koita Foundation.

WHAT IT DOES

With the intent to "drive academic programmes, research, and industry collaboration in digital health", KCDH’s academic and research focus areas will include clinical applications, healthcare data management, healthcare analytics, and healthcare machine learning, among other things.

According to IIT Bombay, the centre will offer minor, dual degree, Masters, and PhD programmes in the Healthcare Informatics field. KCDH also seeks to conduct outreach programmes for healthcare and industry professionals, in hopes of enabling them to act as force-multipliers.

KCDH hopes to foster strong collaborations with digital health partners such as hospitals, medical research institutes, healthcare NGOs, and governmental organisations. In doing so, KCDH may establish joint academic and research programmes.

The research university also said that KCDH is establishing an advisory board comprising healthcare professionals, industry veterans, and academics. The board will guide the overall vision and progress of KCDH.

Concurrently, KCDH looks forward to working closely with the Koita Foundation. Apart from providing financial support to digital healthcare partners, the Foundation will help KCDH establish industry relationships.

WHY IT MATTERS

Amid a global focus on enhancing digital health and informatics, India launched its National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) in 2020. Stemming from the National Health Policy in 2017 which aimed to digitalise healthcare in India, NDHM is intended to provide the necessary support for the integration of digital healthcare in India.

According to IIT Bombay, KCDH will act in synchronicity with India’s drive for digital health adoption at a national scale.

This comes alongside the overwhelming toll of COVID-19 on India, with a 24.9 million case load. Things have begun looking up, and over the weekend, India reported a two-month low in daily COVID-19 infections.

THE LARGER TREND

Across India, the pandemic has spurred numerous collaborative initiatives to transform healthcare with digitalisation in varied ways.

In June, India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT collaborated with Avaya Spaces to offer free COVID-19 virtual care services to patients.

Deloitte also partnered with the state of Haryana in Northern India to create new models of public health engagement and collaboration, with COVID-19 virtual home care services.

ON THE RECORD

"Digital Health is critical to improve healthcare at scale. We are delighted to support IIT Bombay in establishing the Centre, which can play a pivotal role in improving healthcare in India and across the world," said Rizwan Koita, who founded the Koita Foundation.

"The centre will enable an ecosystem that can help address healthcare challenges that have been so glaringly exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital Health and Informatics need cross-functional expertise," added Subhasis Chaudhuri, director of IIT Bombay as he called for cross-functional expertise between digital health and informatics.