Penn’s Center for the Advanced Study of India supported College senior Prithvi Parthasarathy’s development of an artificial intelligence triage tool that streamlines patient access to care at a hospital in India.
Parthasarathy, who is pursuing a neuroscience major and healthcare management minor, piloted a model that integrates patient records to ensure they receive accurate referrals to specialists and testing areas. He created this tool while enrolled in CASI’s fully funded 2025 summer internship program at Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India.
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Parthasarathy explained that he was drawn to the internship due to an interest in having a “global healthcare experience.”
The hospital is also located in his “cultural home state,” making the opportunity “meaningful” to him “on a personal level.”
Aravind Eye serves as the headquarters for the larger Aravind Eye Care System. The hospital assists patients — up to 250 paying and 400 for free — from across the nation, and the network aims to provide healthcare to South India's “rural population.”
Parthasarathy explained that he was initially tasked with observing patients and identifying any challenges that they faced at Aravind Eye. He told the DP that he would register himself as a patient to see what they “go through when they enter the hospital.”
This helped Parthasarathy identify key healthcare barriers the patients faced — including long wait times and uncertainty about where they should go.
There were “a lot of people” coming into the hospital, according to Parthasarathy, which made the interns “very busy” and encouraged him to “propose a way that patients could be more empowered within the clinic.”
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He began working with statisticians and IT specialists to develop an AI triage model that could streamline the hospital’s processes and put together a “proof of concept for figuring out a potential solution in this space.”
Parthasarathy used knowledge gathered in healthcare management courses at Penn to design a model that was scalable across other facilities. He explained that the chief medical officer at a hospital near Aravind Eye expressed interest in trialing Parthasarathy’s AI technology with the patients there.
Looking ahead, Parthasarathy told the DP he hopes to take an “innovative stance” in his career.
“That stance,” Parthasarathy said, is asking “how do you get the healthcare system to be more accessible to patients?”
The CASI summer internship program sends students to organizations across India — along with a stipend that covers transportation and living expenses. In 2025, 11 Penn undergraduates participated in the program.
