- Part of the National Health Stack, the NDHM will bring a unique health ID for every Indian citizen — similar to Aadhaar or UPI IDS — digitised health records and registry of doctors and health facilities
- The Ayushman Bharat and the National Health Authority recently announced the launch of NDHM sandbox initiative, which invites healthcare professionals, software providers, startups to develop products
- While the industry experts and healthcare professionals are positive about NDHM, there is a huge concern around its security of health systems and privacy of personal health records
With the launch of National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), India took a big leap towards enhancing the crumbling and aging healthcare infrastructure and ecosystem. While digital healthcare has been a key focus in the fight against the pandemic, the NDHM creates the roadmap for the future.
Part of the National Health Stack, the NDHM will bring a unique health ID for every Indian citizen — similar to Aadhaar or UPI IDS — digitised health records and registry of doctors and health facilities. Last week, the launch of NDHM sandbox was announced, inviting healthcare providers, software providers, startups to join this in co-developing tech products for one of the largest digital health ecosystems in the world.
NDHM
For healthtech startups, the big benefit will be the streamlining of data and patient records. “In the current times accessing patient’s data or medical history is a challenging task for the doctors, as many do not have the records, and sometimes people may even miss out on sharing crucial medical history, therefore having a clearer insight about a person’s health can assist medically by communicating with the doctors about the patient,” said Ayush Mishra, founder of hybrid telemedicine startup Tattvan E-Clinics.
Startups will have the added advantage of information being carried forward in the health ID, including all tests done, existing diseases, medicines prescribed and more. This will help doctors to examine patients in a better way, because it will be easy for them to analyze the medical condition of the patient faster.
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Shabeer Ali, managing director of Hodo Medical Informatic Solutions, a Thiruvananthapuram-based healthtech startup which is into digitising healthcare for hospitals, stated that startups will finally have guidelines and standards to create their healthtech products. “This will be a grand move which will help the healthcare startups to become part of a grand ecosystem. So far, most small healthtech startups that collect any kind of health data are forced to develop their own electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Now, instead of that, they can simply integrate their tech into an already existing EMR system,” Ali added.
Similarly, in the pharmaceutical space, the company will be able to develop region specific products based on this data which can become a huge differentiator. For example, blood sugar levels of patients across the country are different, and depending on the diet that they follow, a small change in the percentage of dosage can have a significant impact on patients health.
Meena Ganesh. MD and CEO of Portea Medical, which is into healthcare at home, said that outside of facility based care is going to pick up in the coming months, as witnessed in the Covid-19 times, because of the comfort levels and the ability to monitor patients remotely. All these things will further accelerate the use of connected devices.
“I believe that the current environment is providing us a huge amount of tailwind to enhance the productivity of the healthcare facility,” she added, sharing that Portea is actively looking at taking part in the NDHM sandbox programme to develop products and solutions that help the authorities to develop an effective technology framework.
The Bigger Picture
Almost all the healthcare professionals and healtech founders that Inc42 spoke to seem to have a positive outlook on India’s digital healthcare mission. India has definitely drawn inspiration from numerous models including the USA, UK, Singapore, Estonia, South Korea, UAE among others.
Citing the example of Estonia and how it digitally transformed its whole healthcare ecosystem in this manner, HODO’s Ali said that the NDHM would bring in uniform standards throughout software providers, and it would create a piggy-backing effect which will be beneficial for all parties.
“As of now, all startups are reinventing the wheels, working on EMR, CMS, LIMS, which are already there. Instead, startups will start focusing on niches like diabetes management, pregnancy and integrate with existing EMR, CMS Players,” added Ali.
Source: Inc42
