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Govt addressing all privacy concerns around digital health mission, NHA CEO Indu Bhushan says

Envisioned as the first step towards Universal Health Coverage, National Digital Health Mission aims to provide every Indian with a personal health ID and identifiers to doctors.

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New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government is working to address privacy and accessibility issues with regard to the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), Dr Indu Bhushan, Chief Executive Officer of the National Health Authority and Ayushman Bharat, said Thursday.

“These are issues of concern. We have spent a lot of time on both the issues,” Bhushan said, responding to a question posed by ThePrint during a virtual session organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) on ‘Post-Covid Healthcare World’.

Envisioned as the first step towards Universal Health Coverage, the NDHM aims to provide every Indian with a personal health ID and identifiers to doctors and health facilities.

Since it was announced on 15 August by Prime Minister Modi, the policy has spurred a lot of discussions as experts and critics have raised concerns over how privacy and security of the data will be ensured.

“In our entire architecture, we have ensured we placed privacy and security as a key feature of our infrastructure,” Bhushan said. “The way data is to be collected, stored, used and shared, we have strict protocols of doing that.”


Also read: Caste, politics, sex life — questions you could be asked under govt’s digital health mission


Of consent, accessibility & other issues

During the session titled Digital Revolution — Going Viral, Bhushan highlighted what he said would be the key aspects of the NDHM database. “The first thing we had worked on is a consent manager that will allow the data to be shared only with the informed consent of the individual. And the idea is that consent can be given only for a part of data.”

According to Bhushan, patients will have full control over how much data they wish to share for whichever duration of time. “The participation in the mission is also voluntary… If you think later on that it is not useful, you can also withdraw and delete all your records,” he added.

The White House coronavirus adviser, Dr Scott Atlas, in a pre-recorded interview aired during the conference, said such a digital database will only be stone-walled if it were proposed in the US. “My opinion is that people in the US culturally are very concerned about privacy, particularly regarding medical care information. And that limit (to implement such a system here) will be there for a while.”

Bhushan, meanwhile, also addressed concerns regarding the issue of accessibility around the digital database. “We are working on systems that can take care of different kinds of situations and offline modules that can help in situations where there is no internet and no connectivity,” he said. “We are also making it the kind of application that helps people who are not literate or have language barriers be a part of this mission.”

On the reluctance of healthcare practitioners to use the NDHM, he said, “In our discussion, this issue has come up and doctors prefer to write their prescription… This gives us a challenge on how we can make it easier for doctors, now with voice recognition and AI tools coming up and many other technologies… Also once it is mandated top down, it becomes industry practice.”

Digital revolution amid a pandemic

The session also had among the panellists Kieran Murphy, the CEO of GE Healthcare, Dr Sangita Reddy, joint MD of Apollo Hospitals, Jan Herzhoff, president of Elsevier’s Global Healthcare Business and the Boston Consulting Group’s Bart Janssens.

All the panellists commented on the proliferation of digital platforms and the function they served during the pandemic.

“We ideated at a 360-degree holistic approach to Covid which we called Kavach,” Reddy said. “The first thing was that we accelerated our mobile app called Apollo 24/7. Within seven days, we launched our Coronavirus cough & risk scan, which allowed people to answer seven questions. This is AI-enabled, which says whether you are high risk. 13.5 million people downloaded the app.”

BCG’s Dr Bart Janssens also pulled in the example of the Swasth app, a telemedicine platform built by private collaborators, including Practo and Medanta. “If it weren’t for the crisis, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “It is an unlikely collaboration across the boundaries of many companies.”


Also read: India needs a digital health mission. But it also needs data privacy law to ensure it works


 

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