NHA Inks MoU with India’s Leading Institutions to Strengthen India’s Health AI Ecosystem & Benchmarking

The initiative aims to establish India-specific, clinically representative, and reproducible benchmarks for evaluating Health AI systems before their deployment at scale.

National Health Authority (NHA) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with India’s leading institutions, including the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), and Translational AI for Networked Universal Healthcare TANUH Foundation, to advance the Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI (BODH)as a national Digital Public Good.

The initiative aims to establish India-specific, clinically representative, and reproducible benchmarks for evaluating Health AI systems before their deployment at scale.

Through this partnership, the institutions seek to strengthen India’s capacity to benchmark Health AI solutions and advance a robust, contextually relevant, and equitable digital health ecosystem.

The collaboration will bring together NHA’s policy leadership and national health infrastructure with the academic, technical, and operational expertise of IISc Bangalore, IIT Kanpur, and TANUH Foundation.

Under the collaboration⁠, the organisations will focus on development, maintenance, and scale-up of the BODH platform.⁠

The proposed activities will include ⁠building data pipelines and structured health data resources.

The partnership also includes ⁠developing annotation and ground-truth platforms for benchmark datasets and ⁠establishing locally adapted frameworks for Health AI evaluation.

Further, under the collaboration, all the organisations will work on ⁠creating contextual and representative datasets to support safe and equitable AI evaluation, aligned with the Strategy for AI in Healthcare in India (SAHI).

The MoU was signed in the presence of Dr. Sunil Kumar Barnwal, Chief Executive Officer, NHA; Prof. Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan, Assistant Professor, IIT Kanpur; Prof. Phaneendra Yalavarthy, Chief Project Manager, TANUH Foundation; and Prof. Sriram Ganapathy, Associate Professor, IISc.

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