Healthcare
Elevator Pitch
Problem
Seamless continuum of care for patients remains a challenge with fragmented healthcare services and lack of interoperability. This frustrates the potential of digital health.
Health tech solutions today provide solutions but are siloed, fragmented and non interoperable.
Market domination by a few platforms, stifling innovation.
Healthcare data exchange remains a challenge due to non interoperable design of health systems.
Solution
- Open Networks such as Unified Health Interface (UHI) create a transaction fabric connecting all healthcare and wellness services to patient interfaces.
- UHI in India is expanding the digital health market by enabling higher discoverability of healthcare providers and facilities - big or small - and providing consumers access to these verified providers with transparent pricing through any platform of their choice.
Big Wins
- Patients and doctors will be able to use software of their choice to seek or provide care.
- Seamless Healthcare Data Exchange between different healthcare providers, insurance providers and citizens.
- App developers can choose any technology for end user apps and healthcare service provider apps that can become part of the UHI Network.
- Networks reduce the fragmentation in systems even as large and complex as the US or the UK (NHS).
- Fair discoverability for all healthcare service providers.
- Increased accessibility and choice for consumers.
- Enhanced adoption of remote teleconsultation, e-pharmacies and monitoring.
- Services for patients in remote and underserved areas.
Implementation :
Milestones
- National Health Authority (NHA) is responsible for development and implementation of UHI.
- Before UHI, NHA launched a nationwide healthcare digitisation plan with Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM).
- ABDM created the building blocks for digitisation (Identity and Verifiable Registries) and healthcare exchange through National Health Identity for citizens, healthcare professionals and healthcare providers.
- ABDM laid down guidelines for consent driven healthcare data exchange guidelines.
- After enabling digital infrastructure in the country, a services layer through a protocol - enabled transaction fabric was designed through UHI.
- NHA appointed a committee of technical experts with in-depth understanding of the domain to formulate, design and publish the initial UHI Open Protocols.
- Experts from government, academia, and industry, and independent experts were invited to become part of the expert consultation group. A public consultation was held to invite comments and feedback on the design and adoption strategies.
- UHI went live in 2023 and was opened up to all health providers in the country with the following use cases.
- Discovery and booking of digital consultations
- Booking ambulance services
- Booking lab diagnostic services
Challenges
- Compatibility issues between various technologies and standards are arising, requiring significant effort to resolve.
- Adoption of open networks face resistance from stakeholders accustomed to traditional closed systems.
Next Steps
- Increasing the market awareness to enable more market players to become partners.
- Capacity building of the market players to understand the benefits of an open marketplace, given this is a fundamental shift in perspective.
NETWORK GOVERNANCE :
Governance
- Governance Model - NHA is responsible for creating the governance model for UHI.
- Grievance Redressal - NHA will be responsible for managing the grievances faced by the participants on UHI
- UHI Gateway is currently maintained and operated by NHA with two instances - Sandbox (for integrators to test and develop their applications) and Production (Live Environment)
- NHA encourages the open source community to leverage ‘Open Protocol’ to enable digital health services through the UHI Network.
Source: Preliminary research carried out by Cambridge University, JBS. Please note that use cases are evolving.
