With digitalization largely impacting all the sectors of Indian economy, why should healthcare, which is one of the most important, lag behind? The digital revolution in India’s healthcare sector has been aimed to be arrived at with the help of the National Health Stack or NHS, which has been designed to support the initiatives introduced by the Centre under the Ayushman Bharat Yojana to help the low-income households get medical treatments at nominal prices. The objective of introducing NHS is for the system to aid the implementation of a digital health infrastructure in the country.
With the National Health Stack, the Unified Health Interface (UHI), developed by the National Health Authority (NHA), will revolutionize the digital health service delivery network in the country, similar to how UPI revolutionized payment transactions, with provision of services like health ID, health information exchange, healthcare professional registry, and health facility registry. This is how open protocols like the National Health Stack in India are on the path to reimagining entire industries and ecosystems.
The influence of the National Health Stack and development of a digital health infrastructure is such across the country that Aarogya Setu became the world’s fastest app to reach 50 million downloads, that too, in less than 13 days. In comparison, major applications platforms like Pokemon Go took 19 days to reach 50 million users, Twitter, 2 years, Facebook, 3 years, YouTube, 4 years, iPods took 4 years, the internet itself took 7 years to reach 50 million users. Cell phones took 12 years for the same, while computers took 14 years, ATMs, 18 years, television, 22 years, credit cards, 28 years, electricity, 46 years, telephone, 50 years, automobiles, 62 years, and airlines took 68 years.
