Medical education regulator tells med schools to mandate ABHA IDs for patients

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Mint."The creation of ABHA ID is very simple process and can be facilitated conveniently with possession of Adhaar card that has already been extended to people on a large scale," he said.“However, no patient should be denied treatment without ABHA ID" Srinivas said. “For decisions in the assessment for the academic year of 2025-26 and thereafter, the patient and related clinical material authenticated with ABHA ID will only be counted."Another senior official said that creation of ABHA ID for patients will help to ceal with the problem of “ghost patients" – made-up names to impress the government with inflated numbers.

“So far, ghost patients were counted," the official said.“This will bring greater transparency and ensure that there is no fake patient record, which is a problem mostly found in the private colleges," he said. “Whenever our team used to go on inspection at a private colleges, we used to find very few patients (because of high charges).

Now we will have data for whole year and this can be monitored live on our system," said the official.The official said ABHA ID for patients will help the government take decisions on health policy.“We will be able to know how many patients are coming from which region, what health problems they have, which type of disease is prevalent in which city or state and what kind of intervention government has to take," said the official. This, however, points to a larger problem of consent and data privacy.

Although ABDM has been built on the principle of ‘privacy by design’, how the concept of ‘consent’ will work in practice with the overwhelming majority of poor patients remains to be seen. According to government officials, by law, the electronic medical records generated by