Program design & implementation
Designing, launching, and course-correcting disease programs — from TB screening built into antenatal care to community palliative-care models.
Public health · Health data science · Delhi
Public health, powered by data science.
Dr. Saima Furqan is a public health consultant and AI/ML developer with over six years of experience across tuberculosis, HIV, maternal and child health, and palliative care. She partners with programmes, clinics, and funders to strengthen implementation and translate health data into evidence for decision-making — and is developing PalliQ, an AI platform for continuous, compassionate care. Delivered through Pal Care Services Private Limited.
01
What I do
Five ways I help NGOs, research institutions, clinics, and funders — as a hands-on collaborator, not a report-and-leave consultant.
Monitoring, evaluation & data quality
M&E frameworks, indicator design, data reconciliation, and dashboards that make program performance legible to teams and funders.
AI/ML model development
End-to-end model building — from non-invasive diagnostic and prognostic models to decision-support tools clinicians and programs can actually use.
Research & scientific writing
Study design, grant and proposal development, and peer-review-ready manuscripts across public health and clinical domains.
Training & capacity building
Hands-on capacity building for field teams and clinics in data literacy, M&E, and day-to-day program management.
02
Where I work
A career spent at the intersection of disease programs and data — spanning national programmes, research institutes, and frontline clinics.
TB · 01
Tuberculosis
Program implementation, screening integration, and data quality — from national to district level.
HIV · 02
HIV / AIDS
Prevention and care program experience rooted in national programme work.
MCH · 03
Maternal & child health
Antenatal-linked services, anaemia prevention, and integrated screening across the care pathway.
PAL · 04
Palliative care
Community- and clinic-based models for serious-illness and end-of-life care.
HDS · 05
Health data science
Hands-on AI/ML model development — non-invasive diagnostics, predictive modeling, and decision-support tools for clinical and program use.
03
Pal Care Foundation
The charitable trust Dr. Furqan founded in 2020 to make pain relief and palliative care reachable across India — from the cities to the periphery.
Fewer than 1% of the roughly six million Indians who need palliative care each year can access it. Registered under the Indian Trust Act, Pal Care Foundation works to close that gap through service delivery, training, advocacy, and research — so that no one has to suffer in pain.
2020
Founded — pan-India charitable trust
5,000+
Patients supported through Pal Care Clinic
1,500+
Cancer patients reached via Project Aashna
Pan-India
From Kashmir to Lakshadweep
Care delivery
Pal Care Clinic
A Delhi clinic delivering pain relief and palliative care to over 5,000 patients across south and central Delhi.
Community workforce
Project Aashna
Cancer survivors and caregivers from Kashmir, Delhi, and Lakshadweep trained — and paid an honorarium — as community care champions, reaching 1,500+ patients with pain and mental-health screening and ASHA/Anganwadi-linked awareness.
Pandemic response
Tele-health & home care
A first-of-its-kind tele-health palliative helpline and home-care service during Covid-19, so patients with non-Covid serious illness were not left without care.
Education
Capacity building
Training healthcare professionals to integrate a palliative-care approach — including through the height of the Covid crisis.
Access
Affordable in-patient care
A partnership with Ansari Hospital for managed conditions and surgical procedures at affordable cost — free for patients below the poverty line.
Humanitarian aid
Relief in crisis
Oxygen concentrators for Jammu, food kits for Delhi's urban poor and Chennai's trans community, and smartphones for students in Kashmir and Karnataka during the pandemic.
The Foundation's early palliative-care app has since grown into PalliQ — the AI platform Dr. Furqan is building today.
04
Selected projects
Applied machine-learning work from Dr. Furqan's Health Data Science studies — end to end, from messy clinical data to explainable models.
Data analytics & statistical ML
Mortalis-AI
Predictive clinical intelligence for in-hospital mortality
Built and compared XGBoost, LSTM, and Transformer models on MIMIC-III/IV electronic health records (5,000 patients; 137,636 diagnosis codes) to predict in-hospital mortality and length of stay. Work spanned ICD-9/10 harmonisation, severe class-imbalance handling, data-leakage detection, and a fairness audit across ethnic groups.
Result Best model AUC 0.881 (XGBoost), with clinician-readable feature importances
Integrative multimodal analytics
Diet, Metabolites & the Signals of Cancer
Multimodal analysis of colorectal cancer risk
Integrated NMR-based metabolomics with dietary-intake data across 4,596 participants to model colon-cancer risk. Compared intermediate (feature-level) and late (decision-level) fusion with tuned Random Forest models, and used SHAP and partial-dependence analysis to surface the metabolites driving prediction.
Result Late fusion best (AUC 0.583); 70 significant diet–metabolite associations identified
Literature review · Deep learning
Deep Learning & Explainable AI in Cancer
M6 essay across three GI cancers
A critical review of deep-learning approaches and explainable-AI (XAI) methods for diagnosis and prognosis across colorectal, hepatocellular, and pancreatic cancers — examining where models add clinical value, and how interpretability makes their predictions trustworthy for clinicians.
Focus Making clinical AI predictions explainable and trustworthy
Flagship venture · an arm of Pal Care Services Pvt. Ltd.
PalliQ
Predictive intelligence for compassionate care.
PalliQ is the AI solution I'm building — an AI-powered continuous care platform that helps every person living with a serious illness receive personalized, coordinated, compassionate care beyond the hospital. Most systems are built for episodes: visits, admissions, discharges, then silence. PalliQ holds one connected picture that follows the patient between every visit, built on a living Care Graph of symptoms, function, interventions, goals, and outcomes over time.
PalliQ Home
Patients & caregiversThe daily companion — check-ins, medication reminders, symptom journaling, and care plans, always within reach.
PalliQ Clinical
Doctors & nursesSees the trend before the crisis — trend summaries and patient prioritization, so teams act while it still matters.
PalliQ Insights
Hospitals & NGOsFrom one patient to whole populations — dashboards, quality indicators, and program monitoring.
PalliQ Research
Universities & institutionsTurns the care journey into evidence — study management, outcome tracking, and AI-model validation, with ethics and consent.
In active development
Ask about PalliQ
The PalliQ Care Graph
A living care journey — not a stack of records.
An EMR stores events — what happened, and when. The Care Graph stores relationships and trajectories: how symptoms, function, interventions, goals, and outcomes connect, and how they change over time. It's the core idea PalliQ is built on.
The roadmap
Five phases from idea to scale.
Phase 1 · 2 weeks
Discovery
Interview 20 caregivers, 10 clinicians, and 5 administrators.
Output — proof we're solving the right problem.
Phase 2 · 3 weeks
Design
Every screen as a clickable prototype, tested with real users.
Output — a validated MVP design.
Phase 3 · 3–4 months
Build
Develop the MVP; pilot with one hospital or NGO; measure engagement.
Output — a working pilot.
Phase 4 · 6 months
Validate
Collect outcomes, publish results, and improve the product.
Output — published evidence.
Phase 5 · ongoing
Scale
Grants, strategic partnerships, and expansion to more illnesses and settings.
Output — a growing platform.
05
About
Dr. Saima Furqan is a public health consultant based in Delhi with more than six years of experience across disease programmes and health systems. Her work sits at an unusual intersection — the day-to-day reality of frontline TB, HIV, maternal-health, and palliative-care programmes on one side, and the rigour of health data science on the other.
She has contributed to national programmes and research institutions, published seven peer-reviewed papers, and increasingly builds AI/ML models of her own. That work led to PalliQ, the AI platform she is developing for continuous, compassionate care in serious illness. She brings this experience to clients independently through Pal Care Services Private Limited, her own consulting practice and clinic in Delhi.
For programmes that need sharper evidence — or organisations sitting on data that isn't yet driving decisions — this is exactly where she is most useful.
Selected experience
NACO · MoHFW
Pallium India
REACH, Chennai
THSTI
BIRAC
06
Recognition
Awards & recognition
2024
Best Women Entrepreneur in Mental Health
Bharat Dialogues.
2025
ECHO Faculty Member
Certificate Course in Palliative Care — National Program for Palliative Care (NHM), UT of Lakshadweep.
International
Invited guest speaker, Australia
Invited by the Palliative Care Team, Australia, to share palliative-care implementation expertise.
International
Rotary Club recognition, Australia
Honoured for effective implementation of palliative-care services in India.
Indian Public Health Association
Asia Pacific Hospice Network
IAHPC
Let's talk
Have a program or a dataset that needs a second brain?
Available for consulting engagements, research collaborations, and advisory work — remote or on-site.
Email
director@palcareservicespvtltd.co.in
LinkedIn
/in/drsaimasf15
GitHub
github.com/drsaimasf
Based in
Delhi, India