'Work for implementation of digital health blueprint'

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Tuesday urged stakeholders to work towards implementing the National Digital Health Blueprint in a time-bound manner.

"The government is committed to ensuring high quality health care, accessible to all up to the last mile. The digital health interventions are accelerating this transformation and have a huge potential for supporting universal health care," Vardhan said in a statement.

The National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB) focuses on providing an efficient and affordable health coverage through a wide range of data and infrastructure services by leveraging open digital systems that will ensure security and privacy of personal information.

The need of the hour was to create an ecosystem which could integrate the existing disparate health information systems and showed clear path for upcoming programmes, the minister said.

He said there was a need to ensure convergence across these IT systems to monitor and provide health services in a robust and efficient manner.

"The Ministry of Health has initiated efforts in the direction of a comprehensive, nationwide integrated e-health system under the National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB)," he said.

The NDHB will help in providing a common platform for the integration of existing applications in health care domain and data which has existed in silos, either in a public health facility or in a private health care facility in India.

It was also updated that building on the initial document of National Health Stack (NHS) by Niti Aayog, the Ministry of Health has defined clear timelines, targets and the resources required for this digital convergence of health care programmes in the country.

The chairman of the National Digital Health Blueprint committee, J Satyanarayana, has submitted the final report in this regard to the health minister.

Satyanarayana also provided a brief overview of the efforts that have gone into the preparation of the report and made a brief presentation on the overall framework as proposed in it.

He said the priorities of government in health care were included in the National Health Policy, 2017, and this recommendation report by the Ministry of Health had shown the implementation angle for achieving the same.