NDHB - Ambitious But Challenging

The vision of National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB) is to create a National Digital Health Eco-system that supports Universal Health Coverage in an efficient, accessible, inclusive, affordable, timely and safe manner, through provision of a wide-range of data, information and infrastructure services, duly leveraging open, interoperable, standards-based digital systems, and ensuring the security, confidentiality and privacy of health-related personal information. Although it appears to be a very ambitious project, a large number of obstacles need to be tackled for its successful implementation.

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The Government of India approved the National Health Policy 2017 (NHP 2017) with the vision of providing Universal Health Care. As a sequel to the NHP 2017, the Union Budget for the fiscal year 2018–19 announced the Ayushman Bharat Yojana. Later in 2018, NITI Aayog had proposed a conceptual framework for creation of a National Health Stack (NHS) - a set of core building blocks to be built as a common public good that helps avoid duplication of efforts and achieve convergence among the IT systems of the diverse stake holders such as the Governments, the Payers, the Providers and the Citizens. However, the components of NHS went for further examination and as a result a committee was constituted under the chairmanship of J Satyanarayana, former Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to create a framework and implementation plan for NHS. After a series of meetings and brainstorming sessions, the committee prepared the report and named it ‘National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB)’. The report was officially released by Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, on 15 July 2019, to receive inputs from various stakeholders.

A new entity, National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), will be charged with the responsibility of implementing NDHB. The vision of NDHB is to create a National Digital Health Eco-system that supports Universal Health Coverage in an efficient, accessible, inclusive, affordable, timely and safe manner, through provision of a wide-range of data, information and infrastructure services, duly leveraging open, interoperable, standards-based digital systems, and ensuring the security, confidentiality and privacy of health-related personal information.