The Koita Foundation is working with governments, hospitals, and non-profits to push digital health and AI adoption in India through standards, training, and cancer care innovation.
Digital technology has transformed banking, travel, shopping, and entertainment in India, yet healthcare remains one of the hardest sectors to digitise. The Koita Foundation, a philanthropic organisation focused on digital health and AI, is trying to close that gap by working with governments, hospitals, academic institutions, and non-profits across the country.
From Healthcare Unicorn to Philanthropy
The foundation was set up around nine years ago by Rizwan Koita and his wife, though Rizwan became actively involved only after 2021. Before turning to philanthropy, he co-founded CitiusTech, a healthcare technology company that became India’s first unicorn in the sector, which he ran for 17 years. He also co-founded TransWorks, one of India’s early BPO firms, now known as Concentrix.
Rizwan holds an engineering degree from IIT Bombay and a master’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. He also chairs the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH), India’s leading hospital accreditation body covering more than 20,000 hospitals.
Helping Non-Profits Go Digital
The foundation began with an NGO transformation programme aimed at digitising non-profits. Its portfolio includes some well-known names:
- Paani Foundation: Founded by actor Aamir Khan, it works on drought prevention and watershed management in Maharashtra. The foundation supported its digital adoption.
- Vipla Foundation: A platform built for its 50 balwadis in Mumbai to track student participation, performance, and health indicators was later adopted by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and now supports about 1,000 balwadis across the city.
- Antarang Foundation: Career counselling tools built with the foundation helped it grow from reaching about 3,000 students to nearly 300,000 students across multiple states.
- Foundation for Mother and Child Health: A joint platform tracks children with severe and moderate acute malnutrition, along with pregnant women in slums and low-income communities.
Interestingly, the foundation employs no software developers. It has instead built a curated network of vetted small and mid-sized technology partners and typically supports 20 to 25 non-profits with around 25 concurrent technology projects. This model solves a persistent problem: non-profits are usually too small to get sustained attention from technology vendors, but the foundation acts as an important anchor client that keeps vendors engaged and accountable.
Why Healthcare Is Harder to Digitise
According to Rizwan, implementing digital tools and AI in healthcare is fundamentally more complex than in financial services, manufacturing, transport, or e-commerce. Most people have several apps for payments, news, and travel, but almost none for managing their own health records. Even something as basic as storing a blood test report digitally remains out of reach for most patients.
He identifies four things India must get right for digital health to succeed:
- India-centric innovation: Tools must be simple, efficient, and designed for Indian realities rather than imported from the UK or US.
- Adoption: Unlike banks with dedicated technology teams, most hospitals have at best one junior IT person, leaving doctors to make complex decisions about cybersecurity, the DPDP Act, privacy, and cloud deployment without the expertise to do so.
- Implementation: Even after software is installed, staff often use it unsafely. Entire hospitals sometimes share a single username and password.
- Regulation and standards: Without a proper standards and regulatory framework, meaningful progress will not happen.
Building Talent and Disease-Focused Centres
A major gap in India is the absence of professionals who understand both medicine and technology. Top engineering students typically drop biology after Class 10, while top medical students drop mathematics. To bridge this, the foundation has created centres of excellence at IIT Bombay and Ashoka University, producing graduates with strong computer science and AI skills alongside healthcare knowledge.
Rather than addressing all doctors and hospitals at once, the foundation focuses on three disease areas through dedicated Centres of Excellence: cancer, diabetes, and maternal and child health.
AI for Cancer Care and National Training
In a first for India, the IndiaAI Mission partnered with the National Cancer Grid, a Government of India initiative connecting around 350 cancer hospitals, to identify and promote AI solutions for cancer care. The foundation’s Centre for Digital Oncology acted as the bridge for this partnership.
The programme received 299 applications, each submitted jointly with a clinical partner. A jury created an evaluation methodology for healthcare AI that has been made open source. Ten winners were selected, each receiving Rs 50 lakh in prize money and, more importantly, access to the National Cancer Grid network. A separate fund now supports pilot deployments of 28 selected solutions, covering the 10 winners and 18 finalists, across those 350 hospitals.
The foundation’s open-source Digital Health Foundation Course for doctors is available on the government’s iGOT training platform. Maharashtra already uses it, and rollouts are underway in Rajasthan and Karnataka.
Setting Standards Through NABH
Over the past three years, NABH has created a new set of digital health standards for both hospitals and software vendors. More than 2,000 hospitals have applied for certification, and around 250 have already been certified. Hospitals typically need a year to a year and a half to close gaps before qualifying.
NABH also publishes a list of certified software products along with their certification scores, giving hospitals without technical expertise a reliable way to choose software. The foundation does not invest in startups; instead, it identifies promising ones and accelerates their adoption through medical associations and healthcare institutions.
What Patients Could Gain
The end goal is simple but powerful. Patients with chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, cardiac disease, and neurological disorders should be able to capture and store their health information so it is never lost. Simple digital tools could remind patients to take medicines or get lab tests done on time, addressing one of Indian healthcare’s most common problems: patients gradually dropping out of their treatment routines. Getting these fundamentals right, the foundation believes, must come before more sophisticated ambitions.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Koita Foundation promotes digital health and AI adoption in India by working with governments, hospitals, academic institutions, and national health organisations, and helps non-profits scale their impact through digital technology.
NABH has developed digital health standards for hospitals and software vendors. More than 2,000 hospitals have applied for certification, around 250 are certified, and NABH publishes certified software products with their scores.
The IndiaAI Mission partnered with the National Cancer Grid to identify AI solutions for cancer care. From 299 applications, 10 winners and 18 finalists were selected, and 28 solutions are being piloted across about 350 cancer hospitals.