New Delhi: The National Cancer Grid (NCG) has established the Koita Centre for Digital Oncology (KCDO) to promote use of digital technologies and tools to improve cancer care across India. The Centre has been set up with the contributions received from the Koita Foundation, which will support it for five years. The Tata Memorial Centre and Koita Foundation formalized the collaboration by signing an MoU at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai today.
Cancer care is evolving rapidly, and digital tools are becoming indispensable in enhancing cancer care worldwide. KCDO will play an important role in driving digital transformation across the cancer care continuum. KCDO will support NCG hospitals in sharing best practices in digital health, adopting digital health tools, and driving many common technology initiatives including EMR adoption, healthcare data interoperability, reporting and analytics.
KCDO will also enable NCG and NCG hospitals pilot and adopt new technologies – including AI, machine learning, big data, automation, cloud, mobile – which will benefit hospitals, doctors, patients and consumers. Embracing digital tools like tele-medicine and remote patient monitoring will help make care more accessible especially in semi-urban and rural areas. AI-assisted clinical decision support tools will help improve doctors’ ability to provide better care, and mobile patient engagement apps will help patients with medication management and better compliance with care guidelines. Similarly, use of healthcare data analytics across hospitals will enable tracking and benchmarking of clinical outcomes and effectiveness of different treatment and care pathways. KCDO will also partner with academic and research organizations to promote research and development in cancer care.
