A journey of accessible, inclusive and democratised knowledge
A platform for knowledge generation and sharing, Project ECHO is on a steady trajectory to not only touch, but enhance a billion lives. Here is their story of how they are working faster and more efficiently towards their goal with Apurva.ai’s focus on collective wisdom.
Project ECHO is a non-profit movement working on multiple SDGs, with heightened focus in healthcare. With a focused mission of providing the right knowledge at the right place at the right time, they have grounded their expertise as a credible and accessible knowledge hub. They aim to empower communities across the globe, even in the remotest areas, with the right knowledge, enabling problem solving in the communities as well as at scale. This is implemented through the creation of a trusted human network, an accessible and inclusive space for knowledge sharing.
Over a detailed conversation with Kartik Dhar, Chief Technology Officer at Project ECHO, the bigger goals of Project ECHO, role of Apurva and the transformative journey undertaken so far were explored.
ECHO AND APURVA.AI
Dhar explained how Project ECHO and Apurva.ai complement each other. “The combination of a trusted human network and AI amplifies the exponential impact to the communities. Our strength of creating human networks and enhancing their capabilities is expanded by the additional layer of Apurva.” The combination makes knowledge easily accessible and scalable to communities.
Looking back to Dhar’s first interaction with Apurva, Dhar describes his experience. “We were having a live discussion about Apurva and about our iECHO platform, and just seeing it in real time, able to digest our conversations and make sense out of it and present it in a very crisp manner, and then have that knowledge base sort of queryable afterwards. It was really an AHA moment, the first time that I saw Apurva.”
Project ECHO, through their iECHO platform, paves the way for knowledge generation with multiple contributors. iECHO platform is a digital infrastructure where third party systems can access and share data with trusted providers, and forms a strong foundation as a knowledge hub. This platform, already an active knowledge hub, was enhanced by Apurva.ai’s Power of Co-creation.
Power of Co-creation
Power of Co-creation Apurva.ai joins and participates in conversations, both online and offline, to co-create knowledge. The platform actively listens and adds to the discussion and provides perspectives, sentiments, ideas and call-to-actions at the end. The knowledge co-created can be queried during and post the conversations. The emerging collective wisdom is added to the ever-growing Apurva’s digital brain of the organisation.
Dhar was very excited about both the synchronous and asynchronous aspect of insights provided by Apurva during the sessions and the ability to go back and query the system for answers. He states that these sessions of co-creation have added a lot of value. “Many of our partners have been able to distil the learnings, as well as get summarization of very varied and very rich discussion, as it is difficult to get to the crux of and do it in an easy manner.”
Synchronous aspect is when Apurva actively participates in conversations and offers relevant insights, questions and directions in real time. Whereas the
Asynchronous aspect is when Apurva provides insights in different modes of text, audios and videos to queries from previously curated knowledge.
He further elaborates that the multifaceted approach of both short, synthesised crisp summaries and longer, data enriched insights offered different ways to consume the knowledge generated. Though there were some setbacks in accuracy of terminologies, which is critical to amplify accurate information in healthcare, the potential of how Apurva is a game changer was not lost. Dhar is hopeful that with more data and human feedback, the accuracy will improve.
He goes on to say that, “Apurva is able to take a holistic view of things and synthesise data from multiple sources. It has its own insight as well, and it’s able to add them to the data.” He further points out that Apurva stays true to the source, adds its own colours in the form of insights and does it in a balanced way. The circle of credibility and trust in knowledge generated, the core of Project ECHO, retained with Apurva.
ACCESS, INCLUDE AND DEMOCRATISE
With the aim to democratise knowledge, access and inclusion has always been the bedrock of Project ECHO. This is further enhanced by Apurva where silos of communications, restrictions on sharing knowledge and barriers of languages are broken down. Dhar claims that the majority of their discussions are in English, traditionally a big bottleneck. “Now, the participant can have access to and learn resources outsidetheir language as well.”
It was interesting to note the subtle shift of Project ECHO’s aim to empower individual participants with the right knowledge and create a trusted human network to focus on collective wisdom curated from the network and harness this at a large scale. Dhar claims this shift was a result of Apurva.ai’s emphasis on collective wisdom.
Working on a hub and spoke model, Dhar states the Project ECHO is moving towards bringing these hubs and spokes closer to each other. Apurva’s ever growing digital brain, curating the collective wisdom emerging across the world, enhances Project ECHO’s position as a knowledge hub with beyond the box insights on connections and intersections. “In the long term, our view is that the asynchronous component of Apurva would basically be a game changer as far as the community building aspect is concerned. And this is a big focus for us at Echo, in the long run, in creating a trusted human network.”
“Our thinking has historically always been around communities of practice and building human connection. And it will continue to do so. That is the core of what Echo does. But this combination of human plus AI is something which can propel us on our mission to touch 1 billion lives much faster and much more efficiently.”