View: How ABDM could revolutionise India's healthcare system
healthcare system grapples with fragmented patient data, leading to suboptimal care outcomes as providers often lack access to medical histories. However, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), initiated in 2021, has the potential to revolutionise this scenario by:
Providing unique health IDs, ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account), to individuals.
Establishing verified registries for hospitals and healthcare providers.
Digitising health records.
Creating a unified, interoperable digital exchange platform.
This structure could have several benefits:
Enable seamless access to medical histories and empower patients to share crucial info with healthcare providers.
Help healthcare professionals to make more informed decisions, delivering personalised treatments tailored to individual needs.
Integrate telemedicine and remote monitoring technologies to expand healthcare access, particularly in rural areas.
Help more effective monitoring of public health programmes and facilitate research.
ABDM's start has been promising: till 2023, it generated over 440 mn ABHAs, and registered more than 200,000 health facilities and an equal number of healthcare professionals. It has integrated 113 health programmes and tech solutions.
But ABDM's true potential will manifest only when most health records are digitised, securely stored in a federated manner and available to be seamlessly shared with the individual's consent. Achieving full-scale adoption will require time and patience. Drawing parallels with UPI's journey
