View: Covid 19 helped powering digital health innovation

By: Indu Bhushan, CEO, National health authorityThe Covid-19 pandemic has had at least one positive outcome — we have realised the power and potential of information technology (IT), as people look for remote consultations and online capabilities for finding appropriate providers and delivery of medicines.A large, accessible, efficient and effective healthcare ecosystem providing safe, affordable, timely healthcare is critical to the outcome of a nation. The government of India’s National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) aims to build an ecosystem that will bind all stakeholders together in a unified health system.It has the potential to provide the highest quality of healthcare to all Indians, regardless of their economic and social status, or geographical location. This would be done by ensuring that all citizens have access to all their health records in digital form, which can be shared with any provider after free and informed consent. Built on a citizen-first approach, NDHM takes into account the realities of digital experience of 1.3 billion Indians. NDHM has created a ‘sandbox’ that enables technologies or products to be tested in a contained environment and duration — subject to NDHM standards and oversight — and judge the consumer and market reactions to the same. The sandbox will facilitate integration of current systems and IT platforms in healthcare with NDHM building blocks namely, health ID, doctors’ and health facility registries and patient health records.At its core, the sandbox has been created with the objective to foster responsible innovation in health tech services, promote efficiency and bring benefit to consumers. The sandbox brings together healthcare and health tech service providers, centrally and state-run public health programmes, software providers, healthcare aggregators, tech companies to test and integrate their products and services with NDHM. Innovations emerging from this platform will not only reduce the healthcare gap between the rich and the poor by enhancing consumer choice, but will also spawn new technologies that will address the twin problems of digital illiteracy and digital poverty that impact access to healthcare. For instance, all of NDHM products such as health ID, doctor ID and hospital registry also have offline modules that will address the problems of lack of internet connectivity — especially in remote, rural and tribal areas. The NDHM sandbox is founded on the idea that the government, private sector and citizens need to work together as partners to solve the problem of healthcare. It will enable “learning by doing” on all sides. From getting primary empirical evidence on the benefits and risks of emerging technologies to re-innovating and sharpening technologies and tools that will transform the way citizens access and experience healthcare, this platform and NDHM will, with time, build India into a Digital Health Nation where all citizens are equal participants and no citizen is left behind.(With inputs from Anushree Goel, officer on special duty to CEO of National Health Authority)

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