Bengaluru : The National Health Authority (NHA), under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), in collaboration with the IndiaAI Mission and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, successfully concluded the AB PM-JAY Auto-Adjudication Hackathon Showcase 2026 on Saturday, May 9.
The hackathon was technically enabled by the Centre of Data for Public Good (CDPG), a programme within the Foundation for Science, Innovation and Development (FSID), IISc. As the technology partner for the hackathon, CDPG enabled the end-to-end technical backbone required to operationalise the challenge at scale. Through its Trusted AI Data platform, CDPG designed and deployed a secure, privacy-preserving innovation environment that allowed participants to build, test, and validate AI models on curated real-world healthcare datasets without sharing sensitive patient information.
The hackathon marked a significant milestone in India’s efforts to build AI-ready digital public infrastructure for healthcare and demonstrated how innovation can be enabled responsibly on sensitive health datasets.
Conceptualised by the NHA to address critical challenges in large-scale healthcare claims adjudication, the hackathon brought together leading AI innovators, researchers, and startups from across the country to develop scalable solutions for faster, more accurate, and trustworthy claims processing under schemes such as AB PMJAY.
The showcase also featured a high-level discussion on the future of claims adjudication and AI-driven fraud prevention, highlighting the role of AI, Digital Public Infrastructure, and interoperable platforms in building automated, secure, transparent, and scalable healthcare claims ecosystems. CDPG, through its secure and privacy-preserving Trusted AI Data Platform, enabled this capability for the first time at scale.
The initiative addressed a central challenge facing public healthcare systems globally: how to responsibly deploy AI on sensitive health data while maintaining trust, privacy, and governance standards.HA CEO, Mr Sunil Kumar Barnwal, said, “The scale of projects like Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY demand systems that are not only efficient, but also intelligent, universal, transparent, and trustworthy. CDPG’s Trusted AI Data Platform provided the technological foundation to host & manage this Hackathon. Through this hackathon, we wanted to push the ecosystem to explore how AI can fundamentally strengthen healthcare claims adjudication at a national scale.”
Dr Inder Gopal, Research Professor, IISc and Chairman, CDPG said, “Public-sector AI cannot succeed without trusted digital infrastructure underneath it. This collaboration with NHA represents an important step toward building secure, interoperable, and AI-ready data ecosystems for healthcare. What makes this initiative significant is that it demonstrated a new model for innovation—where cutting-edge AI development, data governance, and privacy preservation can coexist at scale.”
To support the challenge, CDPG deployed and managed a fully automated governed technical environment comprising:
● Sandboxed development environments
● Hosted model access
● Curated datasets
● Blind evaluation on unseen datasets
This secure architecture ensured that participants could innovate within a governed framework while maintaining strict compliance and privacy standards, creating a scalable model for future public-sector AI initiatives involving sensitive data.
Ms. Jyoti Yadav, Joint Secretary, NHA said “What NHA has demonstrated here is the template for responsible health AI in India. The question that has paralysed so many digital health initiatives — ‘how do we enable AI innovation without exposing patient data?’ — now has a proven, deployable answer. Share intelligence. Never data. CDPG built this platform for exactly this kind of mission-critical use case. This is not the destination — it is the proof point from which the NHA and India’s health AI ecosystem can now scale.”
Commenting on the technology behind the hackathon, Rakshit Ramesh, VP – Analytics, CDPG said, “We built controlled sandbox environments, secure model hosting pipelines, curated evaluation datasets, and blind testing frameworks that replicated production-like conditions while enforcing strict governance boundaries. The objective was to prove that high-quality AI innovation for healthcare is possible while ensuring stringent trust and compliance standards. What emerged from the hackathon was not just a set of promising AI solutions, but a replicable technical blueprint for how India can enable responsible AI innovation in other high-impact public domains going forward.”
The NHA hackathon represents its first deployment at the centre of a national health AI programme, establishing a replicable model for privacy-preserving AI innovation across India’s public health infrastructure.
The successful conclusion of the hackathon marks an important step toward building intelligent, universal, data-driven healthcare systems in India. The NHA–CDPG collaboration sets a strong precedent for how trusted digital infrastructure can enable AI innovation in high-stakes public systems while preserving privacy, governance, and public trust.
The winners were felicitated during the award ceremony held on May 9, 2026, recognising outstanding contributions across all three problem statements.
