Monash University & Apollo Hospitals collaborate to transform digital health research across borders

New Delhi: Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology has partnered with Apollo Hospitals – one of India’s largest hospital networks – to share data and technology to advance digital health research and solutions in India and Australia.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the two organizations recently. In addition to sharing data and technology, the Faculty of Information Technology (IT) has agreed to conduct educational sessions for the Hospitals’ healthcare professionals while Faculty of IT students will be able to apply their learnings and engage with Apollo Hospitals in real-life practical settings for their projects.

Digital Health lead at the Faculty of IT Professor Chris Bain welcomed the partnership and said it presents a huge opportunity to advance digital health innovation and research in both countries.

“We are delighted with the opportunity this provides both Apollo Hospitals and ourselves to implement first-ever digital health projects in Australia by leveraging the extensive learnings and practical experience at Apollo Hospitals,” Professor Bain said.

“In particular we are keen to locally test and cross-validate the exciting clinical AI work being done by the team at Apollo Hospitals.”

The sharing of data and technology will help Monash to access the learnings from de-identified health data from a pool of more than 200 million patients across Apollo Hospitals.

This will in turn enable significant advancement in research, especially to train artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to identify and diagnose different diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes, some of the biggest killers in the world.

In addition to knowledge sharing and educational engagement the organizations also intend to establish a regular multinational Health AI event where they share research, results, common problems and challenges among participants.

Representing Apollo Hospitals Dr Sujoy Kar celebrated the collaboration and welcomed steps towards the translation of AI research to create real-world impact in the medical sector.

“We at Apollo Hospitals are doing some cutting edge work on clinical AI and its safe implementation. We are very excited at what this new partnership with Monash FIT will bring as part of our global collaborations in this space,” Dr Kar said.

Digital Health Lead at Monash University’s Faculty of IT Professor Chris Bain is available for interviews.