India turns to AI and real-time analytics to strengthen disease surveillance

India is preparing to make a major technological push in public health security by deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI), real-time data analytics and digital intelligence tools to strengthen disease surveillance, officials at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) said on Friday.

The move marks a shift toward early outbreak detection and rapid response, enabling authorities to identify threats before they escalate. “Our vision is to integrate all the various disease reporting systems into one surveillance system under the umbrella of the integrated health information portal. And we are also trying to move up from our detective system to our predictive system,” Dr Ranjan Das, Director, NCDC, told IANS.

Das said the NCDC is collaborating with other ministries and national science institutions to expand its surveillance capabilities. “We will also utilise technology further jointly with the various other ministries, as well as various science and technology institutions that we have across the country, including ISRO, the Institute of Science in Bangalore, the various IITs,” he told IANS.

The plan builds on the success of AI-enabled event surveillance tools already integrated into the Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) of the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP). One such tool, the Media Scanning and Verification Cell (MSVC), uses AI to scan millions of online news reports each day in 13 Indian languages, extracting key details including disease type, location and scale.

Since 2022, the system has processed more than 300 million news articles and flagged over 95,000 unique health-related events — representing a 150 per cent increase in detection capacity compared to manual operations, along with a 98 per cent reduction in workload for surveillance teams.

The technology, known as Health Sentinel, acts as a “digital watchdog”, automatically detecting abnormal spikes in diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and other public health risks before experts verify the alerts.

“From being reactive to becoming anticipatory — the future of disease surveillance in India is now data-driven, intelligent, and predictive,” said Das, along with Dr Himanshu Chauhan, Additional Director and Head of the IDSP. “The shift to predictive surveillance will leverage these powerful analytical capabilities to forecast disease trends and enable intervention even before the first case is reported, marking a major stride in India’s pandemic preparedness.”

Supporting this transition is a new network of Metropolitan Surveillance Units (MSUs) established under the PM-Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM). Officials said the MSUs have already demonstrated strong real-time surveillance performance.

They highlighted a recent example in which the MSU in Nagpur swiftly detected suspected paediatric Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) cases in Chhindwara district, Madhya Pradesh, and alerted the Central Surveillance Unit. The early warning triggered rapid coordination and the immediate deployment of experts from the National Joint Outbreak Response Team (NJORT), working with ICMR, NIE and CDSCO, to mount a quick field response.

“The case illustrates the evolving capacity of India’s surveillance ecosystem to rapidly detect unusual clinical patterns and trigger early intervention — even in complex urban health settings. This approach also underscores the focus on collaborative surveillance that IDSP, NCDC has embarked upon and is cementing it further,” the officials said.