PLATFORM
India Digital Health Network A research and policy collaborative focused on advancing the science and practice of digital health implementation in India.
KIRAN ANANDAMPILLAI SATCHIT BALSARI ABHISHEK BHATIA BARBARA E. BIERER CAROLINE BUCKEE LEO ANTHONY CELI MERCÈ CROSAS URS GASSER ADRIAN GROPPER ABHIJIT GUPTA JOHN HALAMKA BHARAT KALIDINDI SEHJ KASHYAP TARUN KHANNA NISHANT KISHORE KENNETH MANDL RAHUL MATTHAN SUNITA NADHAMUNI TONY RAJ ANGSHUMAN SARKAR VIVEK SINGH VERGHESE THOMAS NITA TYAGI ABIJEET WAGHMARE
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he India Digital Health Network (IDHN), led by Professor Satchit Balsari, Assistant Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is a research and policy collaborative working towards advancing digital health implementation science and practice in India.
Shaping the Policy Landscape Since 2016, the program has helped shape the design of India’s digital health information architecture. The team’s proposal for an API-enabled health exchange ecosystem was adopted and implemented by NITI Aayog in its approach paper for the National Health Stack—a government initiative to digitize personal health records and service-provider records—and then by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India (GoI), in its National Digital Health Blueprint. Key contributions include a) the inclusion of the term “machine-readable” while mandating the portability of personal health data, setting the stage for health data
interoperability in India; b) inclusion of Regulatory Sandboxes in the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which are controlled-testing environments within which existing regulations may be temporarily relaxed to allow experimentation for novel technologies; c) the concept of organizing the core of India’s digital health ecosystem around personal health records as opposed to hospital-based electronic medical records. During the past year, the team also collaborated with a consortium of technology partners to analyze and publish policy responses to key proposed building blocks of the National Health Stack.
Prototyping Digital Health Innovations The IDHN team is also working towards facilitating the operationalization of this proposed digital health ecosystem. Implementation-focused activities have been organized under two workstreams. The first workstream is aimed at testing real-world deployments of digital health solutions that combine technology and task-shifting for primary care. In part-
The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University
