A Digital Push for Healthcare

Context: Health record digitisation is needed for increasing accountability, improving patient outcomes, and advancing evidence-based policymaking. 

Existing Digital Health Data Ecosystem Provisions in India

• Electric Medical Records (EMRs): like National Health Stack Bluebook and National Digital Health Blueprint can provide access to lab reports, x-rays and prescriptions irrespective of where they were generated.
• Draft Personal Data Protection Bill: ensures portability of personal data in a structured format and can pave the way for individuals right to data.

Concerns with Electric Medical Records

• All users must be incentivised or mandated to adopt a standard language of communication for enabling seamless data exchange.

• Presence of several international standards and excessive details recording for the insurance purposes has made the process complex and tiresome.

• Claims-driven documentation system for data exchange: runs the risk of reducing highly-trained professionals to data-entry operators. 
• Privacy Issues: Free movement of health data raises concerns with universal IDs related to personal data like health data and its use by about third-party.
• Consent issues: For E.g. is a 30-year-old archives X-rays are used to train machine learning algorithms to detect cancer, consent would be required from patients, many of whom might be dead.

The Solutions in the proposed National Digital Health Mission (NDHM)

• NDHM is non-prescriptive: unlike its predecessors, it steers away from designing a monolithic EMR
• It only provides a platform for developing a range of data exchange applications.
• It uses consent manager framework: The health information exchange is possible only with requisite permission and with a permanent record of the transaction.
• Ease of Payment: Health data utilisation can accelerate cashless transactions better book-keeping and can decrease friction in payments.
• Portability of clinically-relevant data: across private-public divides and states will cut costs and save time, the ability to monitor compliance.
• It will reduce the burden of healthcare workers by reducing their bookkeeping and sharing workload through the use of technology like voice recognition and artificial intelligence.
• Increased Surveillance: Its ability to conduct timely institution-based syndromic surveillance may alter the course of an epidemic and a nation.
• It can also alter bad medical practice and improve the quality of care.

Conclusion: Successful implementation of NDHM depends on the stable tenure of bureaucrats or politicians and the overhaul of healthcare delivery in India.