Recently, the centre has approved the countrywide implementation of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) with a budgetary allocation of Rs 1,600 crore for five years.

Under the mission, citizens are able to create their Ayushman Bharat health account numbers, to which their digital health records are often linked. Ayushman Bharat could be a flagship scheme of India which was launched as recommended by the National Health Policy 2017, to attain the vision of Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

Ensure easy doing business for doctors and hospitals and healthcare service providers. This program also will enable access and exchange of longitudinal health records of citizens with their consent.

Create integration within the digital health ecosystem, like the role played by the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in revolutionising payments. The mission will not only improve the “equitable access” to quality healthcare as it’ll encourage the utilization of technologies like telemedicine, and enable national portability of health services.

The lack of an information protection bill may lead to the misuse of knowledge by private firms and bad actors. Exclusion of citizens and denied healthcare thanks to faults within the system also are a reason for concern.

However, The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) still doesn’t recognize Health as a justiciable right. There should be a push draft at making health a right, as prescribed within the draft National Health Policy, 2015.

In addition, the failure of an identical National Health Service (NHS) within the UK must be learnt from and therefore the technical and implementation-related deficiencies and failure possibilities must be proactively addressed before launching the mission on a pan India scale.

The standardisation of NDHM architecture across the country will find ways to accommodate state-specific rules. It also has to be coordinated and synchronised with government schemes like Ayushman Bharat Yojana and other IT-enabled schemes like Reproductive Child Health Care and NIKSHAY etc