The National Health Authority (NHA), on Wednesday, announced successful onboarding of more than one lakh government and private healthcare facilities in the Health Facility Registry of its flagship scheme Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM).
This historic milestone paves the way for greater adoption of digital health platforms and services across the country.
The ABDM is a flagship scheme of the government being implemented by the NHA. The Health Facility Registry (HFR), which is being built under the ABDM, is a comprehensive repository of health facilities across modern and traditional systems of medicine. It includes both public and private health facilities including hospitals, clinics, diagnostic laboratories, and imaging centers.
The ABDM aims to create a seamless online platform to enable interoperability within the digital healthcare ecosystem. It has developed building blocks and interoperable APIs (Application Programming Interface) to offer a seamless digital healthcare experience for all stakeholders – health facilities, patients, and healthcare professionals. One of the key building blocks is the Health Facility Registry.
Elaborating on the significance of HFR, Dr. RS Sharma, CEO of NHA said, “Our aim is to build a trusted national platform where patients can easily get details of registered healthcare professionals and health facilities across the country. We have seen enthusiastic participation of both public and private sector health facilities which have now become a part of this national registry.”
Patients can easily search the ABDM network for registered facilities across different systems of medicine like modern medicine (Allopathic), Ayurveda, Dentistry, Homeopathy, Physiotherapy, Unani, Siddha, or Sowa Rigpa. Similarly, we have the ABHA numbers for patients and Healthcare Professionals Registry (HPR) for professionals like doctors, nurses, and paramedics. These national registries will help in making quality healthcare accessible and affordable for all.”
Registration in the HFR allows the listing of the health facilities on a trusted national platform and enables health facilities to get connected to India’s digital health ecosystem through ABDM-compliant software solutions.
This will help citizens seeking healthcare services by improving discovery of health facilities through the soon to be launched Unified Health Interface. Healthcare facilities can register through the website https://facility.abdm.gov.in/ or through various integrators such as health-tech players.
Among the verified facilities, around 97 per cent belong to the government sector. The highest number of verified health facilities are in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, and Assam.
Each health facility is allocated a unique identifier, which is used to map the facility across the ABDM ecosystem and provide comprehensive data on all private and public health facilities in the country.
This unique identifier can be utilised (via consented access) by other entities such as ABDM-compliant software solutions to identify the facility and retrieve and use required facility data for required purposes.