Reiterating India’s commitment to creating a unified global health architecture, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya today appealed to the global community to “converge our efforts towards building a culture of interoperability in the development of digital solutions not only at the country level but globally.”

He stated that greater focus was required on the supplementation of global investments instead of duplication in investments.

“Under the G20 motto of One Earth, One Family, One Future, India is working towards greater collaboration and sustained efforts across the digital health ecosystem. Leveraging its G20 presidency, India is also encouraging the development of a common global platform for sharing medical countermeasures, technical knowledge, digital infrastructure, and cost-effective digital health solutions,” he added.

Mandaviya was speaking on the concluding day of the “Global Conference on Digital Health – Taking Universal Health Coverage to the Last Citizen”, an event under India’s G20 Presidency organized by the WHO and the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.

“Digital health interventions are not just limited to individual healthcare delivery programmes, but are spread across multiple health outcomes, catering to both communicable and non-communicable diseases across the health and disease burden spectrum,” the Indian minister said.

Mandaviya told the participants that “India has taken a quantum leap towards leveraging digital health solutions for effective health service delivery.” In the Maternal and Child health domain, India has created a name-based database of 200 plus million eligible couples, 140 million pregnant women and 120 million children, who were being monitored for ante-natal, post-natal, and immunisation-related health services.

Another key example was the NIKSHAY intervention under the National TB Elimination Programme, through which more than 11 million patients were tracked for adherence to TB treatment, he stated.

Highlighting India’s achievements in digital health and service delivery domain, he said: “India’s focus on Comprehensive Primary Healthcare is underlined with the NCD application, through which more than 15 million population with 30 plus age has been screened for 5 NCDs, in turn creating a health profile for India.”

“Using Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP), which was developed in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, as a national surveillance system, we have ensured name-based, GIS-enabled near real-time surveillance of 36 epidemic-prone diseases,” he said.

Mandaviya apprised that while India was already working towards creating an enabling ecosystem for digital health in the country through various policy level reforms; implementation and scaling up of these digital interventions was parallelly focused upon.

He informed that the Indian Government has taken ambitious steps towards the convergence of advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to achieve the overall vision of a digital health ecosystem.