The Mission To Put Health Records at Doctors’ Fingertips

Context: The proposed data-sharing protocols could achieve better healthcare in India if we get the details right.

Significance of A Digital Health Record System

• Radical Portability: The National Health Authority’s (NHA’s) plan to adapt and extend India’s novel data portability architecture to facilitate transfers across the digital health ecosystem.
• Decentralised Record-Keeping: According to the strategy document, healthcare data must be stored as close as possible to the point of its generation.

• • • Instead of creating a centralized database, data can remain in the hospitals, pharmacies, diagnostic laboratories and polyclinics where they first came into existence.
    • Data can rapidly be shunted across the digital health system from its original place of storage to wherever it is immediately required.

• Choices to the Patients: 

• Much easier for them to consider a second opinion; their reports can be shared instantly with various healthcare specialists.
• This will obviate the necessity for the many repetitive and expensive tests.
• Creation of Public Health Record: This will generate a record of all our interactions with every node on the medical ecosystem, giving doctors all the information, they need for a complete diagnosis.

Way Forward:

• Utilize the portability of existing Frameworks: to create a radically federated design of National Digital Health Mission.

• • • For E.g. Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), a framework is already being used for the sharing of financial information through the central bank’s account aggregator framework.
• The ecosystem should conform to the same digital standard: Atomised medical procedure and into smaller fragments has little or no benefit.

• • • The proposed Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard treats any item of clinical data as a resource that can be described using medically relevant attributes like prescriptions.
    • This will allow a contextual framework of medical procedures rather than traditional ailing coding standards that are currently been used around the world.

• Enhance Interoperability: 

• FHIR offers application programme interfaces through which health data can be easily accessed which will allow the creation of apps for sourcing of data and generating results.
• Offers integration with the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to encourage telemedicine facilities and unlock new possibilities of treatment and patient care.