India’s Digital Health Backbone
The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has built one of the world’s largest digital health ecosystems, with over 104 crore health records linked to over 93 crore ABHA accounts. By eliminating paperwork and reducing waiting times, ABDM is seamlessly connecting patients to insurers, hospitals, and doctors on a single unified network.
Building a Digital Health Infrastructure
India is steadily progressing towards Universal Health Coverage, where everyone can access quality healthcare services without facing financial hardship.
Achieving this goal in a country as vast and diverse as India requires a strong digital backbone. A robust digital public infrastructure is essential for making healthcare delivery more seamless, efficient, and accessible.
A digitised health ecosystem:
Enables the secure management of patient records
Connects individuals with healthcare and insurance providers
Enables seamless portability of health records, allowing citizens to securely access and share their health records at any ABDM-enabled healthcare facility across the country
Generates anonymised health data.
This data can be used to improve healthcare planning and service delivery and power India’s emerging artificial intelligence ecosystem. Innovations in disease surveillance, diagnostics, and healthcare management is a possibility with such an infrastructure in place.
Recognising this, the Government of India launched the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) in September 2021 to develop an integrated, citizen-centric national digital health ecosystem.
Using an ABDM-enabled software, health facilities can create digital health records linked to the Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA). Also, they can access the previous records of the patient digitally after taking the patient’s consent and exchange digital health records through the patient’s revocable, time-bound consent.
ABHA is a unique identifier like Aadhaar that securely links individuals to the wider health system. It helps patients access to digital health services. They can connect to insurers, healthcare facilities, doctors, and other services with all their medical history intact through this one interoperable network
