800 healthcare service providers in UHI sandbox

Over 800 healthcare solution providers are in the process of integrating with the United Health Interface, an open protocol that facilitates a range of digital health services between patients and healthcare providers.

More than 40 providers have already integrated with UHI, according to the National Health Authority (NHA).

“We had thought that everybody working on the UHI gateway sandbox would be very secretive about their apps. But contrary to that, we found that many of the startups developing these apps are very open,” NHA chief RS Sharma told Moneycontrol on the side-lines of Digital India Week 2022.

Successful integrators include Sequoia-backed Pristyn Care, Practo, WhatsApp-based healthtech platform Curelink, JioHealthHub, Paytm and Policybazaar-backed Docprime. Tata Communications, Amazon, Aditya Birla Health Insurance and Tattva Foundation are among applicants approved by the NHA to start integration.

UHI will enable the provision of digital health services including booking of appointments, teleconsultation, and service discovery. Apps used by consumers will be able to “talk” to apps used by healthcare providers through UHI.

“There are applications which are now being tried out and they are actually creating some kind of wrappers on existing applications so that they become UHI-compatible,” said Sharma. “We have created a reference end-user application and we have also set up a health service provider application. We have demonstrated that these apps can talk to each other.”

The integration of an online healthcare service provider with UHI is a three-stage process. The first stage is the development of the capability to create, capture and verify a patient’s Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) number, which was formerly known as the Unique Health Identity.

The second stage allows individual users with ABHA numbers to share their personal health records with healthcare service providers.

In the third stage, the app develops the capability to provide authorised healthcare workers a consent-backed view of a patient’s medical history.

“Currently, all health apps are one-to-one, meaning that only the same application works both at the patient’s end and at the doctor’s end. In the UHI paradigm, any app at the patient’s end will be able to connect with any other app at the doctor’s end,” the NHA CEO explained.

The government first announced UHI in May last year as part of the National Digital Health Ecosystem. It aims to allow users to search, book and avail healthcare services such as teleconsultations or laboratory tests through an interoperable network.

Sharma said UHI is collaborating with the Open Network for Digital Commerce, an initiative aimed at moving online retailing away from platform-centric models.

“We have already joined forces with ONDC and are working in tandem. I am on the advisory council of ONDC. We believe this is the only way to make population-scale applications,” he said.

Adoption of ABHA numbers, considered the bedrock of India’s digital healthcare ecosystem, rose over the past two years after it was linked to the government’s Covid vaccination platform CoWIN. Of 229 million such numbers created since August 2020, the CoWIN platform accounted for about 129 million, or 56 percent.

“Digitisation of the healthcare sector is a big challenge. The long-term gain lies in digitisation for every ecosystem partner,” said Sharma. “There are multiple stakeholders like doctors, clinics, hospitals, laboratories, different systems of medicines – and they are at different stages of digitisation. Some big hospital chains are digitised whereas small clinics may not be digitised and still doing everything manually.” Moneycontrol