What IHMR is not
Several things people reasonably assume about a project like this are not true of this one. We would rather say them plainly here than let anyone infer them.
Not a Government of India programme
IHMR is not endorsed by, funded by, or affiliated with any government body or institution. The name is deliberately “India” rather than “National” for exactly this reason. If that ever changes we will say so clearly and immediately, on this page.
Not an AI doctor
We are not building something that diagnoses or treats anybody. We think AI changes what coordination costs, which is why something like this might now be possible. That is a claim about administration, not about clinical judgement. Where the boundary should sit is genuinely unsettled and we have an open question about it.
Not a surveillance system
One of the ideas we keep returning to is that a system should know when to leave a healthy person alone. Another is that declining something has to be a legitimate outcome with the same standing as completing it, rather than an error state. We are aware that a system built to make sure nobody is forgotten could very easily become one that will not leave anyone alone, and we are worried about it in public.
Not a health database
A record answers what happened. What interests us is what should happen next, which needs different information and possibly rather less of it. If this project’s main achievement turned out to be centralising more records, we would consider that a failure even if the records were excellent.
This site holds no health data about anybody. The only personal information here is a name and an email address, given voluntarily by people who left a comment. See privacy.
Not a finished proposal
Most of this project is labelled hypothesis, and that is not modesty. It is the honest state of the work. We publish what we do not know alongside what we do.
Not clinical guidance
Nothing on this site is clinical guidance, and nothing here should be used to make a decision about anyone’s care. If something reads that way, that is a mistake and we would like to know about it.
Not a claim that preventive health is a new idea
It plainly is not. Preventive and longitudinal health has been argued for, and attempted, for decades. Our question is narrower: what made it hard to run at scale, and has anything about that changed.
If we have written something anywhere that contradicts this page, that is a bug worth reporting. Tell us.