Launched in 2022 by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), India’s Health Sentinel is transforming how outbreaks are detected. Built by WadhwaniAI, this AI-powered surveillance system scans news reports and digital media every day in 13 languages, looking for signals of unusual health events. 

Over the past three years, Health Sentinel has processed more than 300 million news articles and identified over 95,000 unique health-events, of which around 3,500 were shortlisted by epidemiologists at NCDC as potential outbreaks. From April 2022 through April 2025, the AI system reportedly generated 5,000+ real-time outbreak alerts to health authorities.

One of the most powerful benefits: it reduced manual, human-driven media scanning by nearly 98%, making real-time surveillance far more scalable. But despite the automation, Health Sentinel still keeps a human-in-the-loop  public health experts verify AI-flagged events before escalation to district and state officials.

The system’s impact is already visible: in 2024, 96% of health events published by the national surveillance system were first picked up by Sentinel; only 4% came from traditional manual tracking.  According to the researchers, event-based surveillance like this can massively complement standard “passive reporting” systems. 

Despite being a pre-print, peer-review–pending study, the findings suggest that integrating AI-driven media intelligence could greatly bolster public health responses  especially in a country as large and diverse as India.