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Ayushman Bharat: Centre begins work to digitise health records
The National Health Authority, which supervises the running of Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna, the government’s health insurance scheme, is also is tasked with implementing Ayushman Bharat- Digital Health Mission.
The union health ministry has started the registration of all government medical facilities and doctors under the Ayushman Bharat- Digital Health Mission (ABDHM), a process that involves the digitisation of their information , including health records.
In a letter dated November 9 addressed to the directors of all government hospitals in the country, and to the secretaries of all government departments, Union health secretary, Rajesh Bhushan and chief executive officer of National Health Authority, RS Sharma, wrote that the government of India has decided all its health facilities shall take part in the mission, and laid down steps that need to be followed in coming weeks.
The mission was launched by the Prime Minister on September 27.
However, experts say the major challenge for the mission will remain convincing private health care providers to come on board as it is voluntary for them to share information for this digital repository.
The National Health Authority, which supervises the running of Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna, the government’s health insurance scheme, is also is tasked with implementing ABDHM.
The health facilities to be registered under ABDHM include, apart from government hospitals, government-run clinics, laboratories, pharmacies and radiology centres across the country. The ABDHM web portal (https://abdm.gov.in/) has separate verticals for the registration of professionals and facilities under different categories that people can access to register.
In addition to registering the facilities on the “Health Facility Registry” and the doctors (“full-time or part-time”) in the “Healthcare Professionals Registry”, the hospitals and facilities have also been asked to digitize their health records and told to “procure and install a Health/Hospital Information Management System”, according to the letter.
The letter asks that all this “may be started at the earliest”.
The Health Management Information System (HMIS) is a government-to-government web-based monitoring information system that has been put in place by the health ministry, to monitor the National Health Mission and other health programmes, besides providing key inputs for policy formulation and appropriate programme interventions.
The system was launched in October 2008, and currently, around 200,000 health facilities (across all states/UTs) are uploading facility-wise service delivery data on a monthly basis, training data on quarterly basis and infrastructure related data on an annual basis on the HMIS web portal, according to the National Health Mission website.
Among the challenges faced in adopting the system is the need for trained manpower to handle the software.
“There will of course be challenges as it is commonly seen when anything of that scale is getting implemented; we saw that even during the implementation of Aadhar, but it won’t be anything that cannot be addressed. It depends on the way you design the network and protocols under which data exchange happens. It’s more of a technical issue but nothing major,” cyber policy analyst Subimal Bhattacharjee said.
Experts wondered how the government plans to encourage private hospitals and facilities to do the same. Even though India has more private hospitals than public ones, only about 10,478 of the 23,306 hospitals empanelled under the Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme are private ones. The health insurance scheme was launched in 2018.
“The Ayushman Bharat scheme is a classic example of how private health facilities can be successfully roped in to offer treatment. Health care facilities are unevenly distributed and there are many private hospitals in the periphery that are equipped to treat in terms of infrastructure, and can be made use of,” Dr MC Misra, former director of All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, said.
A health ministry official said the government is aware of the challenge, and aims to engage with the private sector.
“We plan to have constant dialogue and engagement with the private sector that includes both private hospitals and doctors. We will also engage with their associations to create awareness,” added this person on condition of anonymity.
Girdhar Gyani, director general of the Association of Healthcare Providers (India), association of hospitals, said, “We have had discussions with government representatives on the matter and more discussions will happen going forward, for sure. The hospitals are willing to participate, even if there may be some concerns, and we hopefully will find a solution to those soon. It sounds like a good initiative and will help patients to better access health care facilities, especially in remote areas where health care delivery services are unevenly distributed. Let us see how the discussions go.”
