A Step Towards Better Healthcare: NITI Aayog Proposes ‘National Health Stack’

The central government think tank NITI Aayog has unveiled the blue print of National Health Stack (NHS), a shared digital healthcare infrastructure. The blue print is in line with the implementation of the Centre’s flagship scheme Ayushman Bharat and other public healthcare programmes in the country.

The government’s flagship scheme Ayushman Bharat aims to provide a coverage of INR 5 Lakh per family annually and benefit more than 10 crore poor families. The Aayog has invited comments from all stakeholders on the consultation paper. The stakeholders can send their comments by August 1, 2018.

According to a consultation paper titled ‘National Health Stack Strategy an Approach’, the National Health Stack will facilitate collection of comprehensive healthcare data across the country.

This will allow policy makers to further build their projections around upcoming outcomes, experiment with new services as well as fill the existing gaps in the Indian healthcare industry among others.

National Health Stack: New Hope Of The Indian Healthcare

According to the consultation paper, National Health Stack will provide foundational components that will be required across ‘Ayushman Bharat’ and other health programmes in India.

The components include national health electronic registries, a coverage and claims platform, a federated personal health records framework, a national health analytics platform among others.

It will also provide a mechanism through which every user participating in the system can be uniquely identified.

Other Key Benefits Of NHS

• allow states to incorporate horizontal and vertical expansion of scheme,
• avoid duplication of efforts
• enable ease of adoption for those without systems or with dysfunctional systems in place,
• continue using their own state system while integrating with Rashtriya Swasthya Suraksha Mission (RSSM) via Application Programming Interface (APIs),

“The stack will embrace health management systems of public health programs and socio-demographic data systems. The registrant may create a virtual health ID to preserve their privacy when interacting with other users or stakeholders in the system,” the paper said.

Once implemented, it is expected that National Health Stack will significantly “bring down the costs of health protection, converge disparate systems to ensure a cashless and seamlessly integrated experience for the poorest beneficiaries, and promote wellness across the population, it added.

[The development was reported by Money Control.]

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