NITI AayoIndia’s healthcare is about to get a digital boost. In its bid to support the launch of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Ayushman Bharat scheme, which aims to provide health insurance to around 10.74 crore families, Niti Aayog on Friday made public the consultation draft on National Health Stack.
Developed on the back of Aadhaar-based India Stack, the NHS is imagined as a nationally shared digital infrastructure backbone. It will be shared and used by both Centre and state across public and private sectors of healthcare. The stack is expected to boost the creation of healthcare solutions based on technology.
For instance, it envisages multiple registries which record data pertaining to all health- sector stakeholders including healthcare providers such as hospitals, beneficiaries, doctors and even insurers. Moreover, these datasets are also likely to contain information about health programmes like information on drugs and interventions, the draft released by the government think-tank said.
The draft paper said that the idea is to leverage the existing infrastructure like Aadhaar, e-KYC, Digital Locker and consent framework to solve for healthcare issues. For instance, the government expects to achieve goals such as nutrition management, disease surveillance, emergency management and even launch health call centres based on the data collected in the stack.
The key components of the stack are national electronic health registries, a coverage and claims platform, personal health records framework, national health analytics platform and Digital ID, among other things.
These layers come together to form the full health stack which will be used in many many ways. For instance, with the help of personal health registries, people will be able to enter the Ayushman Bharat scheme during any time of the year and avail the benefits of policies.
Similarly, the need for unnecessary tests will reduce as the database of all previous tests will be linked in one place for all individuals.
On the enterprise front, a major push is also on using smart contracts based on blockchain technology in the claims engine where policies can be digitally signed and verified to make them tamper proof. The paper claims that these policies can even be claimed completely digitally and with little human intervention.
However, a big issue in managing the project is likely to be the collection of all this data and bringing it into one place. For example, there are already at least three functioning efforts on from the government to collect and digitise health data in the country. The draft envisages its proposed registries becoming the master repositories and merging existing data.
“These efforts have thus far been disconnected from each other and are resulting in redundancy in datasets. The NHS provider registry will not only provide features like self- maintainability, non-repudiability and consented access of data, it will also attempt to unify existing efforts on provider registries and reduce the redundancy in these efforts,” the draft states.
Furthermore, the draft proposes providing incentives of different kinds to ensure that all participants are uploading data on registry on time. “Empanelment of hospitals for health insurance must encourage the insurer or third-party administrator (TPA) to always obtain the information from the provider registry and not collect it directly from the provider. This ensures that the provider has an incentive to keep its registry entry up to date,” it states.