Nursing our healthcare system digitally.
Author — Suditi Bansal (LinkedIn)
Acute shortage of hospital beds, lack of information about medical resources, black-marketing of health facilities and many more such horrific happenings in the past year have awakened us all to the realities of the healthcare system in India. While the brokenness is more apparent now, the healthcare system has been in shambles throughout. We wonder what could be the way forward to improve the healthcare situation of the country.
One such way was conceptualized in a paper by NITI Aayog in 2018 and later introduced to us via the PM address on 15th August 2020 as the National Digital Health Mission.
What is National Digital Health Mission?
The idea of the mission is to create a national digital health ecosystem that supports universal health coverage in an efficient, accessible, inclusive and affordable manner by building digital highways between different stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem such as citizens, governments, hospitals, regulators, etc.
What will the mission enable?
A digital ecosystem can enable wide-ranging possibilities. It can help citizens make more informed choices by making real-time information about public and private health facilities (such as hospitals, prices, procedures) easily accessible. It can enable teleconsultation and e-pharmacies to become a norm even beyond the pandemic. With the digitization of health and medical records of citizens in a standardized format, healthcare providers can access these records and prescribe more contextual and accurate treatments to patients. Processes such as insurance claims and medical reimbursements can be automated reducing the administrative hassle for citizens, hospitals and insurance companies. A digital ecosystem can also strengthen healthcare governance by streamlining the execution of multiple (and often similar) welfare schemes and leveraging data for policy decisions.
What is ‘digital’ in the mission?
A major enabler in the mission is a government-owned core technology platform working in synergy with other (government/private) healthcare systems. The development of the core platform will be guided by some key principles. Let’s look at a few of them!
Health ID — Assigned to each citizen, this will be the key that will uniquely identify a citizen and all related records.
Rich database — A database of doctors, health facilities, personal health and medical records of citizens from all over the country will be maintained.
Building-blocks architecture — The interoperable architecture will allow other entities (example: Practo) to plug into the platform and operate collaboratively.
Consent manager — A mechanism will ensure that citizen’s health records are accessed by stakeholders only with due consent by the citizen.
User interface systems — All stakeholders in the ecosystem will interact with different services of the platform through different apps and portals.
As of now, the development of this core platform is underway with a few modules developed and launched as pilots.
What’s next?
Building this robust, well-connected ecosystem for scale is an audacious goal. To achieve it, the government plans to leverage the existing digital infrastructure (AADHAAR, JAM Trinity, UPI) while addressing the data privacy concerns around the vision.
In parallel, the implementation of such a system at the grass-root level will require the availability of technical infrastructure (devices, internet) and digitally literate manpower in all institutions, physical touchpoints to aid citizens to avail these services and strict policies governing the ecosystem.
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