Reimagining Health Data Exchange: An Application Programming Interface-Enabled Roadmap for India

Area of Science:

• Digital Health
• Health Informatics
• Public Health Policy

Background:

• India launched the world's largest public health insurance scheme in 2018, aiming to cover 500 million citizens.
• The scheme necessitates technological solutions for scaling services, quality monitoring, and accountability.
• India's digital health ecosystem is nascent, lacking digitized, standardized, and interoperable health data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel health information ecosystem for India's National Health Protection Scheme.
• To leverage existing technological advancements and infrastructure for a robust digital health system.
• To create a patient-centric, interoperable, and accessible health data framework.

Main Methods:

• Proposing a federated, patient-centric, and API-enabled health information ecosystem.
• Leveraging India's high mobile phone penetration and unique ID systems.
• Incorporating evolving privacy and data protection laws, global best practices, human-centered design, data minimization, and open standard APIs.

Main Results:

• The proposed ecosystem aims to overcome existing barriers of non-digitized, non-standardized, and inaccessible health data.
• It offers an opportunity to build a digital health infrastructure avoiding pitfalls of existing complex systems.
• The model is informed by 18 months of stakeholder deliberations across academia, industry, and government in India and the US.

Conclusions:

• A federated, patient-centric, API-enabled health information ecosystem is crucial for the success of India's large-scale health insurance scheme.
• This approach can foster widespread adoption of digital health by ensuring data accessibility, interoperability, and patient privacy.
• The proposed model provides a scalable and adaptable framework for India's digital health future.