Ayushman Bharat is the world’s largest health insurance program initiated by the Government of India. It is an ambitious project that will provide easy asses to healthcare for 500 million people of the country. It is an initiative to improve the primary healthcare in the country, especially for the underprivileged.
However, the program will reach the zenith of success only when the Government of India relies on modern technology to record, secure and share information to manage healthcare services and operations. Though it is a long way from now, tiny steps forward now can take this program to the next level. The world has realized this and have moved forward to digitize healthcare and it is now our turn to bring in technology and revolutionize healthcare in India.
Effective use of EHR
EHR came to India in 2013 with the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW) adopting the Indian EHR standards in September 2013. Since then, the idea has been improving and evolving in leaps and bounds. Now is the time to accept it completely and use it to amplify the Ayushman Bharat program. EHR enables the management of a patients’ records of his/her treatment and diagnosis digitally so that it is accessible to hospitals, clinics, labs and insurance companies throughout the patient’s lifetime. EHR enables the delivery of better care more economically and in the adoption of personalized and preventive healthcare practices.
Building ecosystem with EHR
Though EHR is the need of the hour, it faces many challenges to keep up with the vast and order-less state of the Indian healthcare system. To create a splendid future for Indian healthcare EHR needs to be adapted across private and public health care institutions. Other than in major cities, most of the population of India rely on public institutions for their healthcare needs and the whole public health system is hampered with the lack of adoption of EHR. In order to build an EHR based health ecosystem and make this program operational in a larger and better level, the public institutions also need to digitize their system and the government should play a prime role to make that happen.
EHR for privacy of information
Appropriate use of digital tools such as EHR is important even to secure data and privacy of the persons. EHR is a critical component of technology enabled healthcare as it is capable of providing privacy of clinical data and ensure that the data cannot be used by any health institution or establishment (Private or Public) without the consent of the patient. Every person has complete ownership over their clinical data and have the utmost authority to ensure that their clinical data and can be used only upon prior approval.
Ayushman Bharat is expected to leverage the proposed National Health Stack that is expected to create a framework that will interact with various health application programming interfaces within each system and transfer data from one another. It is an idea that could change the lives of large populations that are currently excluded from healthcare benefits of the existing ecosystem. If EHR and Ayushman Bharat program go hand in hand, it has astonishing potential to create wonders for people and in the medical sector of India.
We at HealtheLife have been working to create tools to make EHR adoption simple and painless. Our tools such as EHR.Network and AyushEHR are designed to help healthcare practitioners and establishments get on to the EHR adoption bandwagon and be prepared for Ayushman Bharat.