INTERVENTION SPOTLIGHT

International Innovation Corps (IIC) has supported the inclusion of privacy safeguards in the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) framework.

The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) aims to support the integrated digital health infrastructure of the country. It seeks to bridge the gap between stakeholders in the health sector by creating digital registries for the three main healthcare stakeholders— healthcare providers (doctors, nurses, ASHA, etc.), healthcare facilities (hospitals, PHCs, etc.) and individuals.

IIC fellows have been working with the ABDM team to facilitate the rollout of the registries by developing strategies and policies to put data privacy safeguards in place. They have helped ABDM develop the Healthcare Information Consent Manager for the registries which is data blind. It also facilitates consensual data sharing and data collection between stakeholders in the health system. They have put privacy safeguards in place such that the system at no point becomes privy to health data, and individual data rests solely with healthcare providers and individuals.

IIC collaborated with the government to incorporate best practices from the GDPR and the Aadhaar exclusion debates. This contributed to the successful launch of ABDM in 2020. The Health ID was launched in September, 2021, and the enrolment was expanded during COVID vaccinations. As of February 2022, 14 crore Health IDs have been generated.

Opportunities For Philanthropic Investment

With 99% of India’s adult population being covered under Aadhaar, and the Supreme Court passing judgements on preventing denial of services due to authorisation errors, there has been significant progress in mitigating exclusion risks. However, to ensure exhaustive mitigation of the risks and design new IDs effectively, our research suggests the following pathways for philanthropic investment:

Aid implementation of solutions by building feedback loops: Large scale research, grievance redressal mechanisms.

Support implementation of large-scale solutions to mitigate the risks at scale.

The table below presents gap areas and illustrative funding opportunities for philanthropy to further reduce the risk of exclusion for marginalised populations:

Pathways

Illustrative Opportunities

Partner with grassroots organisations to understand the exclusion challenges and fund proof of concept for technology solutions to minimise verification/ authentication errors.

Using the learnings from Aadhaar, conduct data protection impact assessment before linking other digital IDs.

Construct narratives of best practices on digital IDs to build capacity of policymakers for building userfriendly/efficient digital IDs going forward.