MEET
Nikhil Tandon, MBBS, MD, PhD
Nikhil Tandon, MBBS, MD, PhD, is the Head and Professor in the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi, India. Tandon is also a practicing clinician who is highly invested in patient care and believes his research should improve the quality of care that he provides.
“Whatever research I do is anchored into the central theme that it should translate into the benefit of people who I’m expected to treat.”
Over the last 10 years, Tandon’s research has primarily focused on the spectrum of Cardiometabolic Disease. His interests also include autoimmune thyroid disease (which includes thyroid epidemiology, diabetes and metabolic bone disease), and the impact of early life events in adult chronic disease.
His relationship with EGDRC started before the Center had even developed a name. Tandon says he first meet EGDRC Director, Dr. K.M. Venkat Narayan, in 2005.
“Our relationship became more formal and institutionalized when we became part of a group that applied for a Center of Excellence in Cardiometabolic Disease.”
The call for proposals was initiated by the Ovations division of UnitedHealth Group in 2007 and soon after the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health became a co-sponsor. The collaborative group, led by EGDRC, AIIMS, Public Health Foundation of India, and Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, was successful with its application, which resulted in the establishment of the Centre for Cardiometabolic Risk Reduction in South Asia (CARRS) in 2008.
The primary project of the new center was the CARRS Cohort, a population-based cohort of South Asians designed to identify existing and emerging questions related to cardiometabolic disease. The center also included an intervention study, the CARRS Translation Trial, in which Tandon says researchers formulated a strategy to improve the quality of diabetes care in clinics. Using the concept of task sharing, non-physician healthcare providers shared responsibility with physicians in conjunction with a custom designed, electronic decision support system.
Many of EGDRC’s early-stage collaborative quality improvement studies, such as the Diabetes Community Lifestyle Improvement Program trial, the CARRS Translation Trial, and the Integrating Depression and Diabetes Treatment study, helped generate evidence and models to shape the Integrated Tracking, Referral, and Electronic Decision Support, and Care Coordination (I-TREC) program, a collaborative NHLBI-funded project led by Tandon with major contributions from Dr. Shivani Patel.
Working with the Indian government’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Dell Technologies, and Tata Trust, the I-TREC team developed a Clinical Decision Support Software (CDSS). This system was integrated with the National NCD portal to analyze data captured by healthcare providers and generate guideline-based advisories to provide evidence-based care for diabetes and hypertension in accordance with the level of the health facilities services.
I-TREC’s CDSS was recently added to the Operational Guidelines for the National NCD Programme by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India.
“We feel it's going to be useful. We've demonstrated its utility already at each health system level and seen a willingness by doctors to implement this technology,” says Tandon.
