This ‘digital locker’ enables users to keep their health reports in one place

The COVID pandemic has highlighted the importance of managing everything online, especially healthcare needs. With recurring new waves of the pandemic wreaking havoc in the country, more patients are preferring to avoid physical touchpoints and are opting to consult doctors online. Yash Gandhi, Business Unit Head at Docprime, India’s first health locker integrated with the government’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) talks to Business Today on the importance of DigiLocker amidst the pandemic and beyond. Edited excerpts from an interview. 
 
Business Today (BT): How are digital health lockers important? 
 
Yash Gandhi (YG): Digital health lockers like Docprime enable the movement of health records between doctors and patients electronically. The health locker also enables users to fetch their COVID vaccination certificates from CoWIN and store them so that they can share it electronically. With the emergence of telemedicine, online pharmacies, and other virtual wellness models – healthcare delivery is rapidly and surely moving online!  
 
Even beyond the pandemic, digital health lockers bring in several benefits. In times of emergency, your bulky health record folders may not be readily accessible – we have all faced situations where we cannot locate our historical medical records, preventing the doctor from providing the best and most accurate diagnosis. Docprime Health Locker is India’s first Health Locker integrated with the government’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. This free offering allows customers to create their ABDM Health IDs and connect with the digital health ecosystem created by ABDM as well as instantly access, upload, share and manage all their records in one place, eliminating the risk of losing records.  
 
The user can set up the health locker in an auto mode so that whenever a new record is created against your health ID, it gets fetched by the locker automatically. The user may have their records at different hospitals as well as diagnostic labs. But with the locker, they can all be fetched and accessed by the patient in one place and also be shared across healthcare providers. This way, your locker is always updated with all your health information. You can also add family members to your Docprime account, making it a very convenient option to store and manage all your family records in one place. 
 
It is pertinent to note that the customer has complete control of all his records – and no documents can be shared without the customer’s explicit consent. Data privacy is non-negotiable and we have ensured that your locker is safe and secure! 
 
BT: How successful is this Digital health idea of NHDM proving to be? 
 
YG: ABDM holds huge promise in transforming India’s healthcare system – you can think of it as the UPI moment for Indian healthcare! It is a win-win situation for all stakeholders – patients, doctors, hospitals, diagnostic labs, insurers and other players. With the creation of interoperable public digital infrastructure including a unique health ID for all citizens, standardised health facility and doctor registries and a personal health record system for sharing data safely, it promises to empower and bring in a new set of innovators, who will build consumer-centric services on the platform. On the claims side, while patients will benefit from faster claims reimbursements, insurers will benefit from reduced cost of processing claims and product innovation.  
 
Trust is of utmost importance in healthcare. ABDM’s national registry of doctors and medical facilities will enhance citizens’ trust in the healthcare provider they’re approaching. 
 
Even though ABDM is at a very nascent stage of adoption, there is a huge push from the government to empanel doctors and hospitals onto the programme. In November 2021, the union health ministry directed all government medical facilities and doctors to enrol with ABDM and commence digitisation of their information including health records. Today, most of the large hospital chains, path-labs and health tech companies are in various stages of integration - so you will soon start seeing more and more providers linked to ABDM. Currently, around 24,000 hospitals are empanelled online with half of them being private hospitals. With a successful rollout of the ABDM, we might move one step closer to achieving Universal Health Coverage for all citizens. 
 
BT: Apart from this locker, what else is Docprime looking at from a business perspective? What is the larger goal here? 
 
YG: Over time, we plan to expand the bouquet of healthcare services to extend beyond the health locker. We are also exploring partnerships with players across the healthcare ecosystem to enable them to extend the health locker offering to their customers as well. We have integrated with healthcare players including Visit Health, offering their customers the ability to create their health IDs and set up their ABDM health locker. 
 
BT: How are applications processed, who has applied? 
 
YG: In August 2020, the government launched a Sandbox environment for healthcare players to test and integrate these with ABDM. Docprime received the Sandbox approval to create a Health Locker on August 6, 2021, becoming India’s first ABDM integrated health locker. The Sandbox application and approval process is simple yet cumbersome. The first step to integrate with ABDM ecosystem is to register on Sandbox and post national health authority (NHA) approval, they will receive credentials to access ABDM APIs. The integrators are then required to complete 3 milestones of functional requirements as defined by NHA.  
 
Once these are completed, they are required to file for the sandbox exit process which consists of four steps – functional and non-functional testing of the application by an internal NHA team, security testing of the application from any CERT-IN empanelled agency, then a final round of approval with the Health Tech Committee which comprises representatives from the Health Ministry, NHA, etc. Once approved, integrators receive the production approval. This is a fairly rigorous process, which is why barely 1 per cent of applicants have received production approval.  
 
As of Jan 5, 2022, there have been a total of 1,865 applications to the ABDM Sandbox from players across the healthcare ecosystem, of which 700 applications have been approved. Out of these, only 24 applications have received production approval from ABDM – Docprime being one of the first. 
 
BT: Could you guide the readers on how to use Docprime? 
 
YG: The first step is to visit the Docprime website and create your profile and ABDM health ID (this will be in the form of yourchoice@abdm). Next, you send a locker subscription request to ABDM through the Docprime platform. Post this, you need to download the ABDM / NDHM Health Records app from NDHM Health Records (currently Android only) and approve the locker subscription request, choosing Docprime as your ABDM Health Locker. While, currently the NDHM Health records app is the only way to provide consents for locker subscriptions and sharing of health information, we are working on including the consent approval feature in Docprime and soon you will not need to have the separate ABDM / NDHM health records app to provide approval. Once your locker is activated, you can start uploading your documents on to the locker. 
  
Here’s how one can use it: 

• When you walk into any healthcare provider (hospital, clinic, doctor, lab), you will share your health ID with them. You can also show a QR code as displayed on their health locker, which can be scanned by the provider for easy-linkage, similar to UPI. 
• Post consultation, all prescriptions and other records created by that provider will get tagged to your health ID and get fetched into your Docprime health locker.  
• You can also upload documents into the health locker. If you want to share these records with another doctor, you can share your health ID with them and they will raise a consent request for access to your records which you can approve through a consent manager app (currently in the process of building it within Docprime).  
• Once approved, the records are shared from the sharing entity to the receiving entity. In case you decline the request, no health records will be shared. 

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