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From India to the World: Hanooman India’s largest Groundbreaking GenAI Platform Now Live in 98 Languages

Bengaluru May 10th, 2024: SML India and 3AI Holding Limited, today announced the launch of *‘Hanooman’, India’s homegrown largest multilingual and most affordable GenAI platform in 98 global languages, including 12 Indian languages, to build a GenAI ecosystem for India by leveraging the country’s diverse linguistic and cultural heritage.

Hanooman India’s largest Groundbreaking GenAI Platform Now Live in 98 Languages! 2

Derived from the name of Lord Hanuman, it symbolizes the platform’s commitment to using the power of GenAI for the greater good. Hanooman, with all his knowledge, power, and strength always served Ram loyally and we want Hanooman to bring the same GenAI power to humanity. Hanooman has been developed by SML India in partnership with 3AI Holding. The platform aims to reach 200 million users within its first year of launch.

As part of the launch, SML India announced its partnership with leading technology stalwarts and innovators like HP, NASSCOM, and Yotta. Through the partnership, Yotta will provide GPU cloud infrastructure to bolster SML India’s operations. Additionally, SML India’s partnership with NASSCOM is aimed at several initiatives, like supporting AI startups, fostering fintech innovation, engaging with 3000 colleges, and participating in research programs.

The company has also collaborated with the Government of Telangana and the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), to facilitate seamless translation between English and Telugu, enhancing accessibility and understanding of crucial documents like court orders.

These strategic partnerships with leading tech players and government bodies signify a monumental leap forward in India’s GenAI landscape, and underscoring Hanooman’s capabilities and commitment to delivering innovative solutions to businesses and individuals alike.

The 12 Indian languages that the web and app are currently available in include Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Odia, Punjabi, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Sindhi. Additionally, Hanooman will support a host of global languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, and 80 other languages worldwide.

Hanooman India’s largest Groundbreaking GenAI Platform Now Live in 98 Languages! 1

Powered by 3AI Holding’s cutting-edge technology, it combines specialized LLMs built with a dynamic integration synthesis matrix to deliver clear, adaptive insights and transform complex data into actionable intelligence effortlessly. It is presently accessible in its free version, with the premium subscription plan to be launched later this year. Along with its exceptional translation capabilities, Hanooman’s versatile features can handle everything from a casual chat to offering professional advice, as well as perform complex technical tasks like coding and tutoring.

With integration-ready pipelines seamlessly integrating into existing products, Hanooman aims to cater to four sectors, including healthcare, governance, financial services, and education. Hanooman is set to offer an open-source alternative to commercially accessible Large Language Models (LLMs) while providing a closed-source model tailored for enterprises in need of on-premise solutions.

Dr. Vishnu Vardhan, Co-Founder & CEO, SML India, said, “Hanooman represents a new era of AI innovation in India. With its launch, we aim to impact the lives of 200 million users within the first year alone. 80 % of Indians can’t use English, hence, Hanooman’s capabilities to support Indian languages will bring Gen AI to the reach of everyone in India and open massive opportunities for companies and startups bringing Gen AI products to the market.

We envision Hanooman not only as a technological marvel but also as a catalyst for societal change. We see Hanooman as a cornerstone of India’s economic future, unlocking the vast potential of GenAI to drive innovation, productivity, and prosperity across various sectors.”

Arjun Prasad, Managing Director of 3AI Holding, said, “Our mission is clear: to ensure that AI is not just a privilege for a few, but a tool accessible to every Indian. Hanooman embodies this commitment of democratising access to cutting-edge technology to every Indian. What sets Hanooman apart is that it is built in India, built for India, and stored in India (data). Through our strategic partnership with SML India, we strive to cater to a diverse spectrum of users, making AI inclusive and available to everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or location. We strongly believe that by empowering individuals with GenAI, we can unlock unprecedented opportunities for innovation, thereby contributing to the growth of the country.”

The strategic partnership between SML India and 3AI Holding reflects a commitment to the fundamental mission of ‘AI for All.’ By jointly owning Hanooman, both the entities are dedicated to democratizing the GenAI space and bridging the gap between urban and rural India. The platform’s launch marks a significant milestone in India’s AI journey, positioning the country as a global leader in AI adoption and innovation.

Hanooman is now available for download in India and can be accessed through the web and mobile application for Android users on the Play Store.

The forthcoming IOS app will soon be available for download on the App Store

Health

Tredence’s HealthEM.AI Wins NASSCOM’s Healthcare Innovation Challenge 3

Jun 14, 2022 by Agency 0 Comments #Healthcare Innovation Challenge 3, #HealthEM.AI, #NASSCOM, #Tredence

Tredence, a leading data science solutions provider, today announced that its care-management platform HealthEM.AI

won NASSCOM’s Healthcare Innovation Challenge 3 in the ‘inpatient volume prediction based on outpatient Volume’ category. Organized by NASSCOM Centre of Excellence (CoE) – IoT & AI, the initiative aims to support tech innovation in health care by making it efficient, effective, and easily accessible.

HealthEM.AI is Tredence’s value-based care management platform that improves healthcare outcomes at speed and scale by turning data into actionable insights. The platform provides a strong foundation for healthcare providers and payers to deliver key wins associated with value-based care by:

Identifying the future cost of the patient
Identifying rising risk patients and enabling AI/ML predictive modeling
Improving care management productivity and effectiveness

Built by medical science and data science professionals, HealthEM.AI aims to drive value-based care through advanced AI and machine learning models while optimizing costs for healthcare providers and payers.

“With the health industry shifting from a fee-for-service model to value-based care, the adoption of AI to deliver personalized patient care has gained more traction. HealthEM powers the journey to value-based care, optimizing revenues, operational efficiency and patient experience with an accurate risk prediction, prioritization and recommendation engine,” said Tredence CEO and Co-founder Shub Bhowmick. “By harnessing the power of AI, HealthEM.AI makes it easy to take data-driven actions and foster innovation for healthcare organizations. We are honored to be recognized by NASSCOM for innovation in health care and will continue to support our clients in driving both commercial success and patient outcomes.”

NASSCOM’s Healthcare Innovation Challenge aims to accelerate the impact of digital technology in the healthcare sector to achieve the vision of a $1 trillion digital economy as defined by The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY). Aside from hospitals, the third edition of the initiative saw participation from insurance and technology players, who came onboard as use-case sponsors. The program is an initiative of the NASSCOM Center of Excellence, a collaborative innovation platform to help deep-tech startups and companies leverage cutting-edge technologies to build market-ready products.

Business World, News

Being Covid-compliant helped Fintech startups to grow during the pandemic: Risers Accelerator

Mar 6, 2021 by Rekha Nair 0 Comments #Director, #Finance and Technology, #NASSCOM, #NBFCs (Non-Banking Financial Companies), #Rachit Chawla, #RBI (Reserve Bank of India), #Risers Accelerator, #WHO (World Health Organization)

New Delhi: According to a study conducted by the expert panel at Risers Accelerator, a conglomerate of India’s top entrepreneurs established to empower startups, fintech startups have performed brilliantly amid the pandemic – a time when most of the sectors suffered quite a bit. The panel at Risers Accelerator noticed that among all the requests it received from startups from different sectors for support, nearly 45% were from fintech startups.

According to a study conducted by NASSCOM in May of 2020, more than 70% of the startups had less than three months of cash runway. It piques one’s curiosity as to how the fintech sector managed to not only survive but grow tremendously amid such unfavorable circumstances.

Several reasons are being cited for this anomaly. Ever since the pandemic hit our shores, the entire country slipped into a financial crisis. Close to 12 crore Indians lost their jobs during the lockdown period and since a majority of our population has nothing in terms of savings, being out of a job meant being out of money. People needed small loans and they needed them to be disbursed quickly.

Since banks have a rather lengthy and often quite strict screening process, many people would have never got the loans. This is where India’s NBFCs (Non-Banking Financial Companies) came into the picture. With a relatively easy screening process, quick disbursals, and overall user-friendly attitude, fintech startups managed to support the population during the tough times.

Another major reason for the sudden upsurge in the fintech sector was a concerted push for contactless systems. People have become quite wary regarding touching the surfaces that may potentially be housing the dreaded Covid-9 strain.

Naturally, paper money changes hand many times over and is, therefore, an agent for transmission. Even WHO (World Health Organization) and RBI (Reserve Bank of India) have encouraged people to use contactless payments and rely more on digital methods. Moreover, fintech companies are also adept at offering digital banking services like e-applications, e-KYC, online approvals, and disbursals, etc. This helps people avoid face-to-face interactions.

Talking about the unexpected upsurge of the fintech sector, Rachit Chawla, Director, Finance and Technology, said, “Even though most of the sectors have suffered during the pandemic, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the fintech sector has done better than the rest. While it hasn’t been Covid-resistant, it has been Covid-compliant”. Mr. Pravin Khandelwal, Director, Leadership & Motivation at Risers Accelerator further adds, “By leveraging the latest technologies that have been looming on the horizon, the sector has managed to offset the negative effects of the pandemic and has made banking and finance easier than ever. At Risers Accelerator, we are delighted to have received so many requests for support from fintech startups, and as always, we will do our best to ensure that they realize their full potential.”

Business World

Power 8 comes up with innovative solutions to fight corona-virus

Dec 11, 2020 by Neel Achary 0 Comments #Abhinav Saksena, #Founder, #Further Sudhanshu Mittal, #Head CoE Gurugram & Director Technical Solutions, #Head-HMSDC, #NASSCOM, #Power 8, #Sanjeev Kalia

In a presentation to NASSCOM CoE-IoT & AI; Power 8 a noteworthy startup based upon IoT & AI platform and primarily focused on optimising utility bills for commercial buildings and industrial complexes, presented a use case study of its product targeted towards keeping people safe from the CoronaVirus.

During the presentation, Abhinav Saksena, founder, Power 8, introduced Viro-Safe and Viro8 products that are developed by the company to counter the ongoing pandemic. Speaking about the development, Abhinav Saksena said that his team has used UVGI technology, which can kill SARS COVID-19. He stated “We have Viro-Safe, which sterilises grocery items, food items, or any object in order to stop the transmission through surfaces which can be homes, FMCG, or offices. Along with it, we have built Viro8, which sanitises centrally air-conditioned buildings with AHU, HVAC’s like offices and hospitals, in order to stop the transmission through the air”. Their innovative products contain UV-C lights and control panels which is a solution for improving indoor air quality and is also beneficial for power saving. The air quality gets improved by 70%-80% and along with it the amount of energy consumption gets reduced by approx 10%-15% for the entire building.

The startup is supported by Hartron (a Haryana Govt. undertaking) through its state of art facility i.e. the Hartron Multi Skill Development Centre (HMSDC). This Haryana Govt. initiative is aligned to the Startup India Campaign of the Govt. of India and is committed to providing the right tools, right techniques & right methodologies to aid & assist start-ups in their growth.

Acknowledging & appreciating the efforts of Power8 towards fighting the global pandemic, Sh. Dhammapal Chawhan, MD, Hartron said, “Tackling the global pandemic which has affected lives all over the globe requires contribution from everyone in the society. We at Hartron are all for supporting & grooming start-ups who can offer a rapid response to counter the pandemic through innovative technological solutions. The world is going through challenging times, and solutions such as Power8’s Viro-Safe & Viro8 can make a difference by offering necessary tools albeit solutions to face the situation.”

Sanjeev Kalia, Head-HMSDC, said that a lot of people have ideas, but implementing ideas is not easy and it’s harder still to raise capital. Here at HMSDC we are doing our very best to nurture start-ups by developing an ecosystem where young brilliant minds with idea’s can come together; give shape to their ideas and in the process contribute to the society as a whole.

Further Sudhanshu Mittal, Head CoE Gurugram & Director Technical Solutions, NASSCOM, added that the Government of Haryana is a pioneer in the country when it comes to promotion of innovation. At NASSCOM CoE-IOT & AI we are committed to supporting and promoting startups developing innovative solutions. It is a matter of pride for us when our startups develop and deploy solutions that are able to make an impact. We look forward to continued success from Power8 and other such players.

These developments by Power 8 have been approved by ASHRAE, ISHRAE, REHVA and recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Many countries such as China, Singapore, and South Korea have started adopting these technologies resulting in successful limitation of the spread of SARS coronavirus.

Business World

Clickpost selected for NASSCOM Emerge 50 Awards 2020

Nov 12, 2020 by Gouri Achary 0 Comments #Clickpost, #Naman Vijay, #NASSCOM, #NASSCOM Emerge 50 Awards 2020

Clickpost, India’s largest and Asia’s second-largest logistics intelligence platform has been selected to feature in the Emerge 50 Awards 2020 under the ‘Logistics and Supply Chain’ category. Conducted annually by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the Emerge 50 Awards are the most prominent and prestigious event in the nation’s software products industry.

The criteria for nomination to this list are highly selective and change each year to reflect and capture transformational areas in any given category. Every the company nominated is reviewed and validated through a multi-stage process, and further vetted by an appointed knowledge partner and a panel of independent judges composed of industry experts & veterans.

Clickpost was nominated for this award on the strength of its contributions and advancements to e-commerce supply chain logistics. Through the development of an AI-driven logistics technology, Clickpost has succeeded in democratising this field and empowering e-commerce platforms to achieve efficient operations and positive unit economics.

This the achievement has been driven by 3 sustainable differentiators: data, with Clickpost using over 1 billion data points for its AI engine (more than 5x that of its nearest competitor); integrations across the entire delivery ecosystem, including with couriers, shopfronts, order management systems, warehousing systems, and CRMs (Customer Relationship Management); and issue-specific use cases, wherein ClickPost has automated over 100 different types of exceptions (more than 4x that of its nearest competitor).

“The NASSCOM Emerge 50 stands as a testament and a recognition to India’s role as a leading global software innovator. It is among the industry’s most coveted awards ceremony, and securing a spot on it is something that every tech company aspires to. As such, we are thrilled to have merited a spot on this year’s list,” said Naman Vijay, Co-Founder of Clickpost, of the announcement. “Since its inception, Clickpost has been at the forefront of the e-commerce intelligence logistics business in India. This nomination is a vindication of our efforts, and we shall continue to work towards expanding our cross-vertical offerings across a wider geographical spread.”

Initiated by NASSCOM in 2009, the Emerge 50 Awards programme annually identifies, showcases, and supports the top 50 innovative and agile start-up companies that are foraying into untapped territories and redefining the way IT can make a difference. Over the course of 11 editions, these awards have successfully identified an array of companies that have gone on to achieve great heights of success. Out of 525 unique winners, over 395 are still active while more than 85 companies have made successful exits. These businesses have raised a combined total of USD 2.6 billion in equity funding following their victory at these awards and seen the emergence of two unicorns – Druva and Freshworks.

Since it’s founding, Clickpost has rapidly established itself as Asia’s second-largest integrated logistics platform and become a leading player in India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia regions. It has more than 100 e-commerce clients across Asia and powers over 10 million shipments every month. It is currently a trusted partner of some of the biggest brands in India’s online retail landscape, including Nykaa, PharmEasy, and RealMe, among others.

Business World

Israel Partners with The Circle for Launch of Founders Club: an Early- Stage Startup Accelerator

Oct 31, 2020 by Gouri Achary 0 Comments #Dr. Ron Malka, #FoundersClub, #Israel, #Karanpal Singh, #NASSCOM, #Nemesisa, #Rajat Tandon, #The Circle

The Circle has launched a new business accelerator FoundersClub (F.C.), for early-stage startups., an iteration of its successful innovation space, The Circle. Work. On the occasion, Ambassador of Israel in India H.E. Dr. Ron Malka said, “Israel is a Start-up Nation and we are keen to share our advanced technologies and innovations with entrepreneurs in India.

The true strength of our growing partnership is the people to people bonds. So we are proud to partner with The Circle in boosting the startup ecosystem in India.”Elucidating further about the launch, Karanpal Singh, MD, Hunch Ventures said.”The Circle. Work is based on the philosophy of prioritizing the entrepreneur and building a community around them. Now Founders Club is the iteration of that platform to leverage the best of The Circle’s community, and source it out to entrepreneurs.”

F.C is a community-driven ecosystem, where synergistic teams of entrepreneurs will work on their solutions in a strategic model tailored to the opportunities in the current market. F.C will address some of the biggest challenges for startups today – market access, mentorship, funding, corporate connections, education, space, and the necessary partnerships so critical to scale early-stage companies. F.C. will be led by Nemesisa Ujjain,; a former head of India’s largest industry-backed partner programs at

NASSCOM (NIPP). An Entrepreneur, Open Innovation Consultant, Mentor at Startup India; Nemesisa will be front running The Circle’s Innovation Program for startups and corporate engagement. Rajiv Bathla, who is the Business Head at The Circle, and former VP Operations with 20+ years at American Express, will help and guide Nemissisa for running the operations of the program.

Commenting on the timing and purpose of the Founder’s Club, Nemesisa adds, “We know what it takes to create great startups and scale successful companies. The F.C. is the sum of knowledge of all stakeholders; from our partners to the mentors from various fields, and the investment expertise. We have put this together so that in these tough times, India’s entrepreneurs don’t have to go it alone.”

F.C’s mission is to provide focused attention to select teams of early-stage entrepreneurs, who have a product with some traction and are now looking to scale. At a time when many incubators and accelerators are being launched with a wide variety of scopes and missions, the team at F.C.will aim to execute on a specific set of deliverables for their entrepreneurs oriented toward their fundraising and mentoring goals.

With support from our strategic partners like The Confederation of Indian Industry, Amazon Web Services, Freshworks and The Embassy of Israel, F.C. founders will get access to coaches who will help them think global from Day 1. Our startups will get the opportunity for pitching to our exclusive investor network called the “Circle of Angels” for the purpose of fundraising.

Building on this, Rajat Tandon, President of the Indian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (IVCA) says “Accelerators like The Founders Club can play an important role to support budding entrepreneurs, especially in these tough times, providing support on niche specialisations, meaningful mentoring, connects & bringing experience on the board of new startups.”

Along with Rajat, F.C. has many other great partners. From serial entrepreneurs, mentors and angel investors like Madhumita Ramanathan (India Head of Strategy and M&A, Experian), Mahavir Sharma (Chairman TiE Global & Chairman Rajasthan Angels (RAIN)), Vishal Gupta (Founder, Kabeela Life), Gaurav Kachru (VC and

Entrepreneur) , Amit Dutta (Serial Entrepreneur and Former Head of Marketing at Unilever), Biten Kathrani (APAC Head of R & D, Johnson & Johnson), Zohare Haidar (Founder, Digital Street Dubai), Seetharaman Venkatraman (ED, Nomura India), and many more; to SaaS unicorn Freshworks, Agnii (Invest India), NVIDIA, NVIDIA, Segment, Amazon’s AWS, SAP Labs, PayU and other technology partners.

The Circle F.C.’s International partners in Israel, UAE, Singapore, Europe and the U.K., will greatly help startups looking to expand. Early Stage Start-ups across all industries are eligible to apply (for an upto 6 Month program). Applications for the same are now open.

To learn more, visit www.thecirclefc.com

Business World

QuEST and NASSCOM Foundation launch the Resurgent Communities initiative to Foster Digital Skills and Entrepreneurship

Sep 22, 2020 by Gouri Achary 0 Comments #Ashok Pamidi, #NASSCOM, #Niketh Sundar, #QuEST Global, #Resurgent Communities initiative

Bengaluru, September 18, 2020: QuEST Global, a global product engineering and lifecycle services company, and NASSCOM Foundation, today announced the launch of their Resurgent Communities initiative. The year-long initiative aims at helping the communities who lost their livelihood due to the COVID-19 pandemic to sustain themselves and thrive in the new normal. QuEST has partnered with NASSCOM Foundation as the first organization from the industry to support a community under the Resurgent Communities initiative to help it become self-reliant. More than 2000 residents of Mithun Reddy Layout at Bellandur in Bengaluru will receive support through this initiative.

The Resurgent Communities initiative is divided into three phases spread across the next 12 months. The first phase aims at providing immediate relief by distributing ration kits to 400+ households and sensitizing the community on how to co-exist and continue their day-to-day chores without being infected.

In the Reform phase, school-going children will be provided with education and at least one adult per household will be made digitally literate.

The third phase will enable the community to re-imagine their livelihoods by getting skilled or creating new, more robust micro-entrepreneurship. The initiative will also work towards creating intra and inter-community collaborations to create women self-help groups and community level associations etc. The NASSCOM Foundation and QuEST will partner with an on-ground NGO – Smile Foundation – who will help both the organizations in executing this initiative.

The relief work started today and was marked by the presence of leaders from QuEST and NASSCOM Foundation, and volunteers from both organizations distributed relief kits to the residents.

Speaking at the occasion, Niketh Sundar, Chief People Officer, QuEST Global, said, “We are delighted to partner with NASSCOM Foundation to support the community at Mithun Reddy Layout, Bellandur and enable them to become self-reliant. Education and skill development have now become the most important and powerful tools that play a critical role in shaping the lives of communities and their people. The Resurgent Communities program aims at sustainable development of communities by providing them with digital skills, job opportunities, and entrepreneurship skills. Through such initiatives, our focus is to provide basic skills for the underprivileged, thereby creating opportunities to enhance their livelihood for a better tomorrow that will benefit the entire community. We are looking forward to associating with NASSCOM Foundation, where we can engineer a change for the communities around us.”

Ashok Pamidi, CEO, NASSCOM Foundation, said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has posed challenges like never before, even though a lot of states and cities have lifted the lockdown, the marginalized communities continue to get disproportionately affected with loss of daily wage work and income. A study has shown that non-migrant workers may have an income drop of 57%. For India, with almost 22% of its population living in poverty with wages less than $2 a day, this can be devastating.

Providing relief to these communities is only a temporary solution. NASSCOM Foundation’s Resurgent Communities initiative hopes to take the Prime Minister’s agenda of a self-reliant India forward. The initiative seeks to help communities become self-reliant by not just providing them with relief, but shaping their future through education for the youth, and digital skills, job and entrepreneurship skills for the adults. We are grateful to QuEST Global in taking the lead and supporting the community at Mithun Reddy Layout, Bellandur, and urge all our member companies to become a part of this initiative by supporting similar communities across India.”

QuEST Global, a product engineering and lifecycle services company, has always been driven by purposeful passion. The company firmly believes that technological innovations driven by human intellect, education, and entrepreneurship have been responsible for making most of the advancements in our society. The social outreach program of QuEST is firmed up on the founder’s principles – aspiration, humility, and hunger – that encourage its employees to achieve goals and do things for the betterment of the society. Over the years, the company has supported several schools in Bengaluru, Belgavi, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Pune, and Trivandrum through the provision of scholarships and infrastructure development.

Business World

We can become tele-health capital of the world: Additional CEO Ayushman Bharat at NASSCOM CoE’s tele-health e-conference

Sep 18, 2020 by Gouri Achary 0 Comments #Dr. Reema Aswani, #Mr. Nick Passey, #NASSCOM, #Sanjeev Malhotra

NASSCOM CoE for IoT/AI, under its Healthcare initiative LHIF, organized a virtual conference themed ‘The Fourth Dimension – Deciphering Telehealth’, which also witnessed the launch of an exclusive research paper titled “Unraveling AI for Healthcare in India” by Mr. Lav Agarwal, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. The research paper was commissioned by NASSCOM Research team in collaboration with EY; it highlights how AI solutions can break the classic healthcare iron triangle providing quality care with improved accessibility and reduced cost. The report also showcases the AI enablement ecosystem in healthcare and lays down strategic bold plays for healthcare organizations to accelerate their AI adoption journey.

Delivering his welcome Keynote, Mr. Saurabh Gaur, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, threw light on ‘India Transformation through AI’ and said, “All emerging technologies will be the engines of growth for the nation. If we want a $5 trillion economy by 2025, we see that these technologies will be great enablers as we forward. There is a huge opportunity for the Indian IT companies also as they now contribute 8 per cent to Indian GDP and they can move forward. We look at technology to make healthcare more accessible and affordable. There are opportunities to have creative outcome modelling; when you have huge data you should be able to collate it and work around it to save lives. We would like to have industry partners for each field and collaborate with academia and government. Through the National e-governance system, we have exposed 1300 APIs to access different data sets. We are looking at an exciting future as we move ahead on these technologies.”

Addressing the gathering, Chief Guest Mr. Lav Agarwal, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, stated, “We as a country always had the strength in terms of IT. In the last 8-10 years, the Ministry of Health has been working on various applications and we also have disease surveillance programs. We were able to create a large amount of data when National Health Policy Blueprint came in 2019 where we were looking at an accessible and affordable health system. In 2019, India started thinking of an integrated approach, and as part of this came National Digital Health blueprint. It was to bring all the initiatives together and create an electronic health record.”

Talking on Telehealth and how India can leverage technology, he said, “We have ongoing programme National Medical Network and we have created a structure for them which has National centre and several regional centres that will become the hub for telemedicine services. Then we have e-sanjeevni application developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Mohali; we are strengthening the application by making all the centres to start using this application and right now 24 states are using this application. We are the biggest telemedicine provider in the world today. To make this application more robust, our friends can come up with good ideas. Can we have a chatbox on top of this application which can provide information to the consumer and can it be integrated in such a manner so that application starts thinking of clinical support decisions.”

Saying that India was very prompt in coming up with telemedicine guidelines when the lockdown was announced, Dr. Praveen Gedam, IAS, Additional CEO, Ayushman Bharat, National Health Authority, Govt of India, added, “The advantage that India has for AI-based clinical support system is the sheer amount of data that we have as it will help in a better quality of additional support systems. E-sanjeevani has already crossed 3 lakh consultations and MHA is already making one more telemedicine platform. We want more such platforms so that people can benefit from the competition. We already are medical tourism hub and we can now become telemedicine hub for the world also. We can scale up very fast as is evident from the success of the Aarogya Setu app, which reached 130-140 million downloads in a couple of months.”

Sharing the advantages of telehealth services, Mr. Nick Passey, Vice President Digital & IT, International & Japan, AstraZeneca, UK, highlighted, “As a patient-centric organization, our ambition is to improve patient outcomes by facilitating their journey from awareness & diagnosis to treatment & recovery. We thus believe telehealth plays an important role in enabling patients’ access to HCPs, especially with specialists in areas of non-communicable diseases. Telehealth will also shape an approach that is adaptable and can be tailored to the needs and preferences of the end-user as we move forward. Our model of partnering with start-ups & providing them scale to achieve this ambition has successfully been proven in many countries“

“The focus on healthcare innovation has never been so important. CoE with its industry partners and support from MeitY and MoHFW, is accelerating creation and Scaling of new technology solutions from startups and large companies,” said Sanjeev Malhotra, CEO, NASSCOM CoE.

One positive side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is the dominance of Telemedicine Platforms for patient/doctor consultations, especially when the social distancing is prevalent. “With the advent of new technologies such as IoT & AI, Telehealth is going to emerge as a strong healthcare delivery channel. It is not only a new channel, but cuts across and enhances the way care is delivered through Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Healthcare Channels,” said Raghuram Janapareddy, Director of Healthcare &Life sciences, NASSCOM CoE and moderator of this virtual event. Dr. Reema Aswani from NASSCOM Research Team explained the highlights of the research report to the audience.

Meanwhile, other speakers discussed at length about ‘Ethical & Legal Contours around TeleHealth’ and ‘Leveraging Telehealth for Health Insurance’.

Tag: NASSCOM