New Delhi, Nov. 20: Two health care professionals have launched an Internet-based platform inviting members of the public and the medical community across the country to share their experiences of malpractice, unethical activities, or scandals in the health care industry.

The new platform, www.medileaks.in, seeks to provide an opportunity to whistleblowers to anonymously reveal information and bolster consumer awareness about medical malpractice, its founders said. The platform is inspired by Wikileaks, the website with classified US government documents launched by Australian Julian Assange.

“We’re hoping the information and trends we get through this platform will also stir regulators and policymakers against such practice,” said Sunil Nandraj, a social scientist, former technical adviser to the World Health Organisation and a co-founder of the platform.

The platform has emerged amid long-standing concerns about the growth of a largely unregulated private health care sector across the country and allegations about a range of unethical or corrupt practices in the medical profession.

Sections of doctors have over several years themselves documented allegations of companies offering kickbacks to doctors for prescribing their brands of medicines as well as of unnecessary treatment or surgical procedures.

The medileaks platform will seek to expose a range of unethical or irrational practices across the health care sector, relying on information from consumers and insiders, Nandraj said. But all of the received information will be processed to delete identities of individuals or institutions.

“We’re not interested in exposing single institutions or individuals — this effort is intended to capture trends that are disturbing and shouldn’t be taking place,” Nandraj told The Telegraph.

Those who might use the website should not expect it to provide direct solutions to their grievances. While the platform is expected to draw most of its information from members of the public who might have had issues with hospitals or other health care institutions, Nandraj said, it is also looking forward to information from health care sector insiders who are concerned about long-term malpractice.

The platform, launched on Wednesday, has yet to receive any public submissions. But its founders have uploaded several sample submissions based on anecdotal accounts they have heard from patients and doctors.

“Even without releasing identities of institutions, we hope to build evidence that will guide informed policy-making,” said Alam Singh, a former executive in a company consulting for the health insurance industry and the second co-founder of the platform.

Many doctors have been concerned that the expansion of the private health care sector has at times imposed pressure on doctors to engage in unethical practices.

“In many of our five-star corporate hospitals, where the main motive seems to be profit for the shareholders, there is an institutionalised system of so-called facilitation charges or fees for diagnostic help given to physicians who refer patients regularly for expensive procedures,” Samiran Nundy, a senior gastrointestinal surgeon, wrote earlier this year in a commentary in the journal Current Medicine Research and Practice.

Nundy said he had learnt of instances where senior doctors are visited by representatives of the hospital’s management and asked to justify whether they deserve the salaries they receive when the revenue they have generated for hospital falls short of certain targets.

A senior doctor in a private hospital in Mumbai had told this newspaper that she had received each month over the past several months a document underlining that the revenue she brought into the hospital had fallen short of the salary the hospital paid her.

“This is the way they build pressure on doctors,” she had said earlier this year.