An intro to ABDM.
Quick basics to India's ambitious key public health infrastructure project.
Previously I had covered the health claims exchange. It’s time to cover the the rest of the ABDM stack.
Firstly as an end user what benefits does one get once it’s fully implemented.
Medical Records like lab tests, diagnosis, discharge summarises etc., will be digitised.
These records will be shared across the hospital ecosystem with your consent. As with carrying cash these days, carrying lab reports will become a thing of past.
It will enable faster access to health care. Whether is patient registration, treatment, monitoring, claims will be digitised. Instant scan and registration for outpatient consultation is an excellent example of this.
Adoption across ecosystem will result in innovative applications in the areas of patient monitoring, home health care, treatments, research and many more areas.
The Unified Health Interface (UHI)
The key goal of UHI is the unify the siloed health infrastructure. A patient (the primary user) should be able to access services from variety of providers from applications of his choice.
Indeed, this is a very ambitious goal to achieve.
The key to achieve unification is that current private user platforms speak with service provider platforms digitally, so that the full system can inter-operate.
What’s an real example I can relate to?
Well it can be any of the current services that you avail. Routine diagnostics report is a very good example of this. Imagine going into diagnostic centre of your choice and getting a blood test or urine routine done. Irrespective of whether the centre is close to your office or house the report will be available at any clinic or hospital you visit. In-fact, these will be accessible at any health facility across the country. So work, vacation or visit to home-town. No medical records to carry.
What is an example of this?
A patient using application of their choice can avail a service they desire in a seamless way.
ABHA - Ayushman Bharat Health Account
EUA - End User Application
UHI - Unified Health Interface
Universal health Interface will enable availing all the services similar to products on a market place. This is likely to result in patient centric, competitive and better service offerings.
In order to accomplish this ABDM hosts
Registry
Health Facility Registry - Registry of clinics and hospitals on ABDM
Health Care Professionals Registry - Registry of professionals on ABDM
Gateway
These are key public infrastructure building blocks. UHI is an open protocol. We will delve more into tech aspects in the up coming posts.
Image below shows the flow of how an user shall avail a service from different service providers.
The next image below shows a quote is issued and a service booked on the platform.
The protocol has also thought through the payments process on UHI as shown below for end user application (EUA) and Health Service Provider Application (HSPA).
I will leave you with two early wins of ABDM
The first one is the instant patient registration when one walks into a hospital for a consultation. You can see, the patient sharing his details via app to the hospital.
The second one is the creation of ABHA numbers.
A 14 digit unique ID
Address similar to UPI
39 Crore (390 Million) AHBA numbers are generated till date.
You can create one here:
https://healthid.ndhm.gov.in/register
In the upcoming posts I plan to cover
What is the current state of adoption and on the ground challenges in adoption?
Technical deep dive into implementation. How ABDM/UHI is adopting FHIR to leapfrog legacy integration challenges?
References
https://abdm.gov.in:8081/uploads/Consultation_Paper_on_Operationalising_Unified_Health_Interface_UHI_in_India_9b3a517a22.pdf