Category: Policy

The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) and National Health Authority (NHA) of India released a consultation paper on its proposed Professionals Registry, a vital public good building block of the national digital health ecosystem.

In response to request for public comment, IDHN submitted a response calling for phased enrollment, tiering registries, stronger verification mechanisms and broader practitioner scope.

We propose that traditional methods to protect patient privacy and control won't work in the new digitized health ecosystem where data is collected, transmitted, aggregated across thousands of nodes instantaneously. We examine the merits and limitations of proposed alternatives like the fiduciary framework that imposes accountability on those that use the data; privacy by design principles that rely on technological safeguards against abuse; or regulations.

In this op-ed in the Indian Express, we share that portability of medical records will pose challenges, require answering concerns of doctors and patients, and take time.

We call for the inclusion of regulatory sandboxes in the nation’s digital health ecosystem, as successfully done in the fintech sector, to provide a real-world testing environment for mHealth solutions before deploying them at scale.

In comments to a Joint Committee of the India Parliament on the 2019 Personal Data Protection Bill, which aims to protect the personal data of individuals throughout India, we highlighted the implications of this law for health data and academic research being undertaken in the country.

AI can help universalize healthcare but to roll this vision out globally, thoughtful reconnaissance is needed of what problems need solving, what data are needed to solve them and how best technology can be leveraged to collect these data.

In comments submitted to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in 2019 on its proposed National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB), we recommend the adoption of Regulatory Sandboxes.

On April 3rd 2019, IDHN convened over 40 stakeholders across public and private sector for a workshop in New Delhi to to present the early prototype of its work at the “Powering the PHR” conference, and learn from the several initiatives across the country that are building components of what may ultimately become India’s health-tech grid.

On November 27 2017, in response to the white paper published by the Committee of Experts on Data Protection Framework for India, we recommended that data protection law encompass health data protection; systems that ensure privacy by design will fare better than systems based on consent and notice; data portability be interpreted as portability of structured health data; anonymization and aggregation over de-identification for securing data; and fiduciary responsibility of data controllers to the individual.

We suggest that the proposed National eHealth Authority could usher a digital health revolution in India but that privacy laws need to be revisited to sufficiently protect nationapatients’ privacy