A New Public Health Operating System
Khushi Baby’s operating model strengthens public health systems by closing the gap between data, insights, and action—particularly at the last mile of service delivery.
How It Works
Every deployment begins by sitting with district and state officials to identify the most pressing health priority — whether maternal mortality, child malnutrition, TB, immunisation gaps, or another program. We establish a baseline, identify where the care cascade breaks, and define what closing the loop looks like here.
This is not a rapid assessment. It takes time, field visits, and co-design with community health workers — who understand the barriers to care that no dashboard will ever surface on its own. The question we start with is: what needs to happen to solve the problem.
Before a single data point is collected, we work with government counterparts to agree on entry and exit strategies, operationalize MoU terms, and integrate with existing digital portals. A clear mandate to reduce duplicate data entry for health workers — not add to it — is a non-negotiable starting condition.
This means training and supporting community health workers and officials, developing government budget lines for long-term ownership, and ensuring the digital infrastructure serves people rather than fragmenting their work further. The enabling environment is as important as the platform itself.
Community health workers use CHIP to enumerate every household across the geography — establishing a live registry of named, located individuals that every health program can track over time. This is the substrate on which all insights and actions depend. Without it, targeting is directional at best.
The census maps multi-dimensional vulnerability — social, economic, geographic, and health — and integrates with national platforms so data collected once flows across programs rather than being re-entered multiple times.
Raw data becomes actionable through AI and GIS dashboards that show where high-risk populations are concentrated, where referral loops are breaking down, and which individuals need follow-up before their window closes. Insights flow to officials at block, district, and state level — including health secretary and chief minister offices — and are directly linked to action scheduling.
Supportive supervision structures for community health workers, live data quality monitoring, and an inbound and outbound call center ensure the system doesn't stall at the insights layer.
In districts identified by NITI Aayog and government as top-priority and aspirational geographies, Khushi Baby co-establishes a Health Action Center with the health department. A lean interdisciplinary unit is proximally deployed to establish a command center and prioritize closing the public health feedback loop — building on our COVID-19 pandemic response experience and mimicking the urgency of those war rooms.
The HAC does not replace government health workers. It coordinates them. Care escalations, referral follow-ups, and daily outreach that would otherwise fall through the cracks are tracked, acted on, and measured.
Closing the loop at the district level creates evidence and tools that travel further — informing policy at state and national level, enabling partner organizations to reach communities Khushi Baby cannot, and building a continuously improving evidence base for what works in public health.
CHIP is our operating platform. Vertical technologies — smartphone diagnostics, LLM-powered tools, AI triage — are tested at scale within CHIP, then made available as government-owned infrastructure for partners to build on.
Our data layer creates a continuously updated evidence base for public health interventions — shared with research partners, informing program design, and feeding back into how we operate.
CHIP data has shaped national TB surveillance strategy, Maharashtra's tribal health policy, and district action plans for climate-health vulnerability — turning ground-level evidence into systemic change.
Playbooks, datasets, and platform components are open-sourced — so partner NGOs and governments can deploy proven solutions without starting from scratch, and reach deeper into communities we cannot directly serve.
DATA
Our digital platforms make data collection simple and free of duplication for frontline health workers. Information captured on the ground is consolidated and made visible to the right stakeholders in the system.
INSIGHT
Our analytical infrastructure converts field data into clear, decision-ready insights that are presented in ways that make action straightforward for everyone in the system.
ACTION
Our health action centres enable data-driven decisions and improved health services to close the loop of healthcare to the last-mile communities. This can come from a change in policy, program, practice or partnership.
NURTURE
Identifying and treating malnourishment in children
NURTURE — Identifying and treating malnourishment in children
India's malnutrition crisis is often misdiagnosed as an identification problem. In reality, the systems to find malnourished children exist but the systems to treat them are fractured. Of approximately 100,000 SAM children identified annually in Maharashtra through the Poshan Tracker, only 10–15% are accounted for in treatment. The rest disappear from the system because no shared system exists to close the loop.
NURTURE is Khushi Baby's response. It is an end-to-end child nutrition and health tracking program that converts passive identification into an active feedback loop thereby closing the gap between a child being seen and a child receiving care.
Before building anything, Khushi Baby spent time with concerned supervisors, public health staff, and district officials to understand exactly where the system was breaking down. The gap was not in identification. It was in what happened after. Children required clinical verification and referral, but there was no clear owner for these steps, no shared record between departments, and no mechanism to track whether a child had received care. This gap analysis shaped everything NURTURE was built to do.
NURTURE uses a live API to pull SAM and MAM identification data directly from the national Poshan Tracker. This eliminates duplicate data entry and gives ICDS supervisors a real-time, ready-to-action line list of children who need follow-up. For the first time, both the Department of Women and Child Development and the Department of Public Health can track the same child across the entire continuum of care from identification at the Anganwadi Centre to treatment at a Village Child Development Centre or Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre. A unified child record means no child falls through the gap between departments.
NURTURE's dashboard gives supervisors and district officials real-time visibility into where children are dropping out of the care continuum between identification, clinical verification, referral, treatment initiation, and recovery. Officials can see which geographies have the highest SAM burden, where referral delays are longest, and which sectors are underperforming.
Weekly state-level nodal reviews now use NURTURE dashboards to identify bottlenecks and make targeted decisions — shifting malnutrition governance from retrospective reporting to real-time accountability. Currently, 42,000 SAM children are actively tracked, across 95% of local administrative units in Maharashtra.
NURTURE does not just surface insights. It activates the people who need to act on them. ICDS supervisors, as the primary accountable verifiers, use NURTURE to conduct appetite tests, validate SAM status in real time, prioritise home visits for the most severe children, and ensure referrals are completed and treatment initiated. Over 2,500 ICDS supervisors have been trained on the platform. Supervisors report faster identification, less reliance on paper registers, and easier planning of weekly visits.
The insights generated through NURTURE travel further than the district level. Dashboards are reviewed at the state level and have directly informed over half a dozen policy amendments by the Department of Women and Child Development fundamentally changing how malnutrition care is governed across Maharashtra.
The model is owned and operated by the Maharashtra government, designed to be replicated in Rajasthan and Karnataka, and built for integration into national Poshan systems at scale.
The knowledge gained from running our model gets transferred onto a playbook to replicate at scale. This allows us to adapt it to multiple health programs: reproductive, maternal, neonatal and child health and nutrition, non-communicable diseases, tuberculosis, infectious and vector-borne diseases, immunizations, climate and health.
The goal is to make the playbooks versatile enough to be used effectively across various health areas over time, as required.