“Digitizing Health data will fill many gaps in the Healthcare system”

Technology has the potential to transform many healthcare services. But despite the availability, technologies have not been embraced by the healthcare sector that much before the COVID-19 crisis.

- Soma Tah

But things are changing fast. India, recently, has embarked on the ambitious National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) journey to create a digital health ecosystem under which every Indian citizen will have unique health IDs, digitised health records with identifiers for doctors and health facilities. The Mission is expected to bring efficiency and transparency to healthcare services in the country.

But will India be able to replicate the same success with NDHM the way it did with Unified Payments Interface (UPI)? Can we build a similar solution for the Healthcare sector also?

“Unlike UPI or payment, Health is a multidimensional issue. Also, the ecosystem partners in the health ecosystem are quite large in numbers, and not all are technology-savvy. Bringing together the entire medical fraternity and other healthcare ecosystem playersconvincing them on how it will bring down the costs of healthcare, and how it will benefit the patients, in turn- is not an easy task,” said Dr RS Sharma, CEO, National Health Authority during a fireside chat in the PCQuest HealthTech Forum on the topic, ‘The future of Indian HealthTech’.