National Health Stack: iSPIRT’s Attempt To Replicate India Stack (Deja Vu Anyone?)

National Health Stack: iSPIRT’s Attempt To Replicate India Stack (Deja Vu Anyone?)

SUMMARY

As the National Health Stack goes live for testing with a host of APIs and hooks for private healthcare players, India would do well to learn from the data lessons of the past from Aadhaar and India Stack

But there remain multiple questions unanswered such as the lack of adequate privacy laws and a suitable authority to regulate. Is India making the same mistake it did with Aadhaar?

Like in the case of India Stack and UPI, there are allegations that the partner companies working on the National Health Stack will have an unfair advantage in terms of knowing the full capabilities of the platform and be ready with the right products

India's healthtech startups were growing rapidly even before the pandemic, but Covid-19 has ushered in a new age. This series dives into the trends, startups business models emerging in the wake of Covid-19.“It will take a few months before all the APIs get authenticated and certified by an empanelled ecosystem of certification agencies,” iSPIRT Foundation’s core volunteer Siddharth Shetty, who has closely worked on the National Health Stack project, told Inc42.“The Personal Data Protection Bill has not been passed through the parliament. There is no law that currently governs it except the fact the Supreme Court of India has recognised Right to Privacy as our fundamental right. In the case of new developments, we have to check if it compromises any fundamental rights or does it comply with the three core directive principles with regards to the fundamental rights.”“As was in the case of the KYC process, earlier the claim-verification process conducted by insurance companies used to cost at INR 600-INR 1,000 per claim. The National Health Stack would reduce the same to a few bucks. This is significant for insurance companies,” added Tyagi.iSPIRT cofounder Sharad Sharma, however, claimed, “Once implemented, the 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.”“The 24 building blocks and one more, which will be added in order to meet the agritech demands, are very similar to Lego blocks which are reusable and the same set of blocks could be used to make different stuff. That’s the concept with NDHB and IndEA,” – Dr Pallab SahaIn such a situation, is the National Health Stack also set to attract controversy as happened in Aadhaar?“We have been talking about this [data privacy] mainly because of Facebooks, Amazons and Googles. The Indian startup ecosystem is not really talking about. This basically implies that either we’re not even worried about it or we don’t see an opportunity huge enough in this particular space,” Chaudhari said.“We are hopeful that the government will soon come up with a regulatory mechanism for the oversight of various processes under the healthtech spectrum. The development of healthtech will need multiple institutions to work in tandem without compromising the integrity of individual systems.”Is iSPIRT helping create an unequal opportunity in the market with Health Stack?“Health is something that affects everyone at every level, hence in terms of the market size, it is the entire population of India. That is the market size that we are trying to address,” – Dr Saha said.

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