A Powerful Partnership Propels the Fight Against Climate-Fueled Disease

“Data-driven tools and analytics were used for both day-to-day decisions and policies for lockdowns, vaccinations, and more. It was the first time data science was being used at such scale and frequency to help set public health policy,” said Rohit Satish, ARTPARK’s Director of Health Data Initiatives.

“And as the Covid crisis slowed, that led to the next question: what other infectious diseases can data help us fight?”

This alliance is as complex as it is exciting.

Dr. Bhaskar Rajakumar understands well how to merge the needs of data scientists and implementers. He joined  ARTPARK as Director for Healthcare Programs after working closely with the government, when he led the Central War Room for the Covid-19 pandemic in Bengaluru. A trained clinician and technology entrepreneur, he has long been focused on how to improve medicine by incorporating technology.

“Headlines about AI lurch between hype and fear,” said ARTPARK CEO Raghu Dharmaraju, who has spent the last two decades bridging innovation and social impact. “And much of the conversation about ‘AI for good’ is only about not causing harm. That’s not good enough,”

“The question is how do we use data science and AI tools to help underserved populations? How do we use them deliberately to level the playing field for broad societal benefit? Using data to make population-scale decisions is one obvious answer.”

The dengue app, said Rajakumar, is “creating the template that we can use for many other diseases.” In fact, interest is coalescing around having data scientists look at the best interventions for not only other communicable diseases, but everything from cancer to rabies to heat stroke made more prevalent by a warming climate.

“There are around 236 sub-districts in Karnataka alone with varied disease outbreak patterns and diversity in weather, socio-demography, and geography, among others,” Satish said. “How should the state public health machinery prioritize its resources across the year? With heatwaves across the country, if people wear hats, or take a different route because of tree cover, what’s the impact on human health? We see a lot of potential for data science to help answer these questions.”

So ARTPARK works to embed data-driven disease surveillance and modeling in public health (typically limited to humans) as well as livestock/wildlife programs.

The team works with government stakeholders and programs at the national level to build a shared strategic approach, and also at the state and city levels to create viable starting points and make tangible progress.

In rural India, some 1.25 million frontline community healthcare workers form the backbone of the Indian health system, and another 64,000 operate in urban areas, Dharmaraju notes. He hopes that in the near future, not only would an individual patient access an app when feeling sick, but community healthcare workers in the country would also have more tools at their fingertips.

This would pave the way not only for comprehensive primary care to address sources of ill health and treat diseases earlier, but for additional reliable community health data to support early warning systems.