National Digital Health Mission
The mission aims to create an integrated healthcare system linking practitioners with patients digitally by giving them access to real-time health records. This will promote prompt and structured healthcare across the country.
Objectives of National Digital Health Mission
- Establishment of Digital Health Systems
- Core digital health data managed by these systems
- To manage the infrastructure requirements for seamless exchange of services.
- Creation of Registries
- It will have all credible data of clinical establishments, healthcare professionals, health workers, drugs, and pharmacies
- Enforcement of adoption of open standards by all national digital health stakeholders
- Establishment of Standardized personal health records
- It will take inspiration from international standards
- Based on an individual’s informed consent, the records can be easily shared between individuals and healthcare professionals, and services providers.
- Enterprise-class health application systems
- The aim will be to achieve health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- Adoption of cooperative federalism while coordinating with states and union territories.
- Promotion of private players’ participation along with the public health authorities
- Making healthcare services portable nationally.
- Promotion of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Systems by healthcare professionals.
- Digitally manage:
- Identifying people, doctors, and health facilities,
- Facilitating electronic signatures
- Ensuring non-repudiable contracts
- Making paperless payments
- Securely storing digital records, and
- Contacting people
Components of National Digital Health Mission
There are four components:
- National Health Electronic Registries
- A Federated Personal Health Records (PHR) Framework – It will fight twin challenges of:
- Access to healthcare reports/data by the patients and the healthcare provider for treatment
- Making the data available for medical research
- A National Health Analytics Platform
- Other Horizontal Components like:
- Unique Digital Health ID,
- Health Data Dictionaries
- Supply Chain Management for Drugs,
- Payment gateways
Salient Features of National Digital Health Mission
- The institutional framework of the mission runs at different levels starting from the apex level, followed by the board of directors, CEO, and operations.
- It is an IT-enabled healthcare infrastructure system
- Health ID
- It will be a repository of all health-related information. Every participating stakeholder including healthcare providers and Indian citizens will be part of this health ID system on a voluntary basis. A unique health ID will be created by every citizen interested to access the benefits of this mission.
- Health data consent managers will be linked with unique health IDs of the patients; who will aid the seamless exchange of the health records between the patient and the doctors.
- The healthcare services will be provided through a mobile app or through an official website.
- Digi Doctor
- He/she will be the one who will be responsible for providing healthcare services across the country.
- An interested healthcare professional can act as a digital doctor to provide prescriptions to patients sitting in a different location altogether.
- He/she will be assigned free digital signatures which can be used to prescribe medicines.