The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM)

Objectives

• To strengthen the accessibility and equity of health services, including the continuum of care with citizen as the owner of data, in a holistic healthcare programme approach leveraging IT & associated technologies and support the existing health systems in a ‘citizen-centric’ approach, the NDHM envisages the following specific objectives:
• To establish state-of-the-art digital health systems, to manage the core digital health data, and the infrastructure required for its seamless exchange;
• To establish registries at the appropriate level to create a single source of truth in respect of clinical establishments, healthcare professionals, health workers, drugs and pharmacies;
• To enforce the adoption of open standards by all national digital health stakeholders;
• To create a system of personal health records, based on international standards, easily accessible to individuals and healthcare professionals and services providers, based on the individual’s informed consent;
• To promote the development of enterprise-class health application systems with a special focus on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals for health;
• To adopt the best principles of cooperative federalism while working with the States and Union Territories for the realization of the vision;
• To ensure that the healthcare institutions and professionals in the private sector participate actively with public health authorities in the building of the NDHM, through a combination of prescription and promotion;
• To ensure national portability in the provision of health services;
• To promote the use of clinical decision support (CDS) systems by health professionals and practitioners;
• To promote better management of the health sector leveraging health data analytics and medical research;
• To provide for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of governance at all levels;
• To support effective steps being taken for ensuring the quality of healthcare; and
• To strengthen existing health information systems, by ensuring their conformity with the defined standards and integration with the proposed NDHM.
• The current strong public digital infrastructure—including that related to Aadhaar, Unified Payments Interface and wide reach of the Internet and mobile phones (JAM trinity) —provides a strong platform for establishing the building blocks of NDHM. The existing ability to digitally identify people, doctors, and health facilities, facilitate electronic signatures, ensure non-repudiable contracts, make paperless payments, securely store digital records, and contact people provide opportunities to streamline healthcare information through digital management.