Australia-based 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) has been signed between the two organisations 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.

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

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 organisations also intend to establish a regular multinational Health AI event where they share research, results, common problems and challenges among participants.