Digital health mission: States and centre take distinct approach

• Follow

With India all set to launch the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), states like Tamil Nadu say that they would run a digital health programme parallely to ABDM with unique user ids, Business Standard reported on Tuesday. While implementing the ABDM, the state is planning to take a distinct approach by linking the Unique Health Identification (UHID) with the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), however it would not share the vital data of a patient’s health with the centre.

Tech Mahindra, Zoho Corporation, Armaan and seven more players have shown interest in providing the technological support for the health programme, by accepting the state’s expression of interest. The state’s target is to create 66 million UHIDs.

According to the publication, the idea behind this is to integrate all the state health programmes into one health id. it will also be used as the proxy id for all 134 state schemes.

While all the data will be with the individual, only those indicators which are necessary will be linked with ABDM. Separate privacy parameters have been designed based on three entities, citizen, health practitioners and the government.

ABDM implementation may have teething problems

Other states feel that running a parallel scheme would create a lot of confusion. Chhattisgarh, for example, is not very interested in having a dual system. The state feels that there is no point in having multiple identifications as they already have Aadhaar as a unique id and everything can be linked to it.

On the other hand, states like Gujarat says it has already integrated its state health insurance scheme with the Prime Minister Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY), and can leverage this database of 6.5 million families and can on-board them on ABDM.

West Bengal is yet to even implement the Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme. Maharashtra confirmed that there is no plan to have any parallel digital id or programme in the state. It also added that the implementation of ABDM is expected to have teething problems.