Events
NDMC Talk Series: Invited Talk by Priyanki Shah
September 02, 2026
NDMC hosted public health leader Priyanki Shah for a talk on surveillance capability mapping and her work to map aggregate-level health data across geographical levels and diseases in India.
Ms. Shah highlighted how differences in data structure, granularity, and access make India's health data ecosystem difficult to navigate. Her project maps government health data from sources including ministries, ICMR institutes, AI Kosh, Data.gov.in, and district-level databases. The mapping has revealed substantial overlap between datasets collected by different agencies and provides a repository to help researchers and other stakeholders identify available data, understand who can access them, and assess their potential uses for public health research.
The project is now moving towards developing a platform with a dashboard, database, and search interface, with plans to connect disease surveillance data with other sources, including climate data. The presentation was followed by a discussion with NDMC researchers and data scientists on data quality, accessibility, usability, and data processing. Ms. Shah emphasised that the initiative aims not to score datasets, but to make existing health data and their accessibility more visible.