Reliance Foundation in pact with Chicago University on training doctors

Reliance Foundation and the University of Chicago have announced a collaboration to develop innovative training to help train medical students and clinicians for better diagnoses and improved health care. The collaboration will also support doctors in real time with evidence-based clinical decision-making tools.

Reliance Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Reliance Industries Ltd.

The partnership will develop cloud-based software applications to train medical professionals using case studies written by experienced physicians and state-of-the-art clinical reasoning methods.

Provided through technology partners i-Human Patients, Inc. and AgileMD, the software will help improve medical education and provide point-of-care clinical decision support tools for health care practitioners. These tools will work to reduce diagnostic errors, improve outcomes and help save many lives.

The program will be piloted in Reliance Foundation's Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre in Mumbai. Reliance Foundation aims to enhance access to quality health care in India.

According to Jagannatha Kumar, CEO, Reliance Foundation. ''Through this collaboration, we look forward to bringing in a technology-based revolution in providing medical education and equipping health care professionals to achieve greater standards of excellence.''

''We have developed this evidence-based program which, with the power of technology, can be widely disseminated. Technology should be a democratising force, and India should be able to leapfrog in deployment of such advanced education and health care delivery tools,'' stated Vinay Kumar, the Donald N. Pritzker Professor and chairman of the Department of Pathology at UChicago.

Faculty members of the University of Chicago Medicine, led by Scott Stern, have developed the Symptom to Diagnosis clinical reasoning methodology. This evidence-based approach to clinical reasoning forms the foundation for the clinical education and point-of-care products being developed in collaboration with Reliance Foundation. Stern will lead the case development team, made up of leading medical educators from the United States and India.