Modi Govt Proposes Creation of National Health Stack, invites comments

According to a consultation paper titled 'National Health Stack Strategy and Approach', the NHS will facilitate collection of comprehensive healthcare data across the country.

New Delhi: India today is witnessing significant trends in health: increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases for instance, as well as marked demographic shifts. Climbing out-of-pocket costs is becoming difficult for most households.

To address the health needs of citizens, the Government of India had announced comprehensive policy response – the Ayushman Bharat Yojana. However, achieving such scale of the yojana requires a rethink the core technology backbone of our system and leverage cutting edge digital solutions to tackle the challenge.

To address this issue, NITI Aayog has came out with a blueprint of the the National Health Stack (NHS), a shared digital healthcare infrastructure, with a view to implement the Centre's flagship scheme Ayushman Bharat and other public healthcare programmes in the country. The NHS is proposed to be the country's first futuristic nationally shared digital healthcare infrastructure usable by both the Centre and states across public and private sector

The National Health Stack (NHS) envisages a centralized health record for all citizens of the country in order to streamline the health information and facilitate effective management of the same. The proposed NHS is an approach to address the challenge and seeks to employ latest technology including Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence, a state of the art Policy Markup Language and create a unified health identity of citizens - as they navigate across services across levels of care, i.e. Primary, Secondary and Tertiary and also across Public and Private.

Once implemented, the National Health Stack will aim to 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 will also provide a mechanism through which every user participating in the system can be uniquely identified.

"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.

The National Health Policy 2017 had also envisaged creation of a digital health technology ecosystem aimed at developing an integrated health information system that serves the needs of all stakeholders.

As per the proposals, various layers of the NHS will be seamlessly linked to support national health electronic registries, a coverage and claims platform, a federated personal health records framework, a national health analytics platform as well as other horizontal components.

"The stack will embrace health management systems of public health programs and socio-demographic data systems," the paper said.

The key components of the NHS includes electronic health registries, coverage and claims platform, digital health ID cards, federated personal health records (PHR) framework and the National Health Analytics Framework.

The Aayog further said that in order to arrive at a well informed conclusion, it has invited comments from all stakeholders on the consultation paper.

The stakeholders can send their comments by August 1, 2018.

For more details check out the document below

http://www.niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/NHS-Strategy-and-Approach-Document-for-consultation.pdf