The National Health Authority (NHA) under its flagship scheme of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) announced completion of 27 major integrations across Government and private sector. These integrations with organizations offering Health Management Information Systems (HMIS), Laboratory Management Information Systems (LMIS), health locker services, health tech services and other digital services are a step towards developing a user-inclusive, integrated and interoperable digital healthcare eco-system for the country.

Launched nationwide on 27th Sept 2021 by the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, ABDM aims to create a seamless online platform that will enable interoperability within the digital healthcare ecosystem. ABDM has developed building blocks and interoperable APIs to offer a seamless digital healthcare experience for all stakeholders – health facilities, patients and healthcare professionals. The digital ecosystem developed is now accessible to health facilities and health tech players for integration.

This integration is a partnership between ABDM and several health tech partners that will help bridge the existing gap amongst different stakeholders of healthcare ecosystem. Currently, the following partners (listed category-wise in the order of their integration completion dates) have received ‘ABDM-integrated’ certificates and logos from NHA for their products integrated with ABDM. These certificates and logos mention the level(s) of integration completed by the product

• HMIS systems like e-Hospital by NIC, e-Sushrut by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Medmantra by Apollo Hospitals, MediXcel by Plus91 Technologies Private Limited, EkaCare by Orbi Health, Bahmni by Thoughtworks Technologies, DocOn by DocOn Technologies, Bajaj Finserv Health for Doctors and Bajaj Finserv Health App by Bajaj Finserve Health Limited

• LMIS systems like Centralised Laboratory Information Management Systems (CLIMS) by SRL Limited and CrelioHealth by Crelio Health Software

• Health locker service providers like DigiLocker by National e-Governance Division, DRiefcase by Driefcase Healthtech Pvt Ltd and DocPrime by DocPrime Technologies

• Health Tech players like Practo by Practo Technologies, Verraton Health by Verraton Health Pvt. Ltd, MarSha Health Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) by MarSha Healthcare, Indian Joint Registry (IJR) by NEC Software Solutions India, PayTM by One97 Communications Limited, JioHealthHub by Reliance Digital Health Limited, Raxa by Raxa Health Information Services Private Limited and Doxper by InformDS Technologies Private Limited

• Other health tech solutions developed by Central and State Governments like CoWIN by Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW), Nikshay by Central TB Division, MoHFW, e-Aarogya by Health Department DNH & DD, ANM AP HEALTH app for Andhra Pradesh Medical Staff and EHR by Andhra Pradesh Health and Family Welfare Department, CPHC-NCD Software by National Institute of Health & Family Welfare (NIHFW), Transaction Management System (TMS) and Beneficiary Identification System (BIS) of Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) by National Health Authority (NHA)

(NOTE: Some products may have features of more than one category of digital health solutions.)

These ABDM integrations of digital platforms in healthcare are achieved through ABDM Sandbox (an experimental digital space which is detached or separated from the actual digital health ecosystem and is created for testing of integration processes before the digital health product is made live for the actual use). Any entity can register on the ABDM Sandbox by following a step-by-step process of integrating and validating their software systems by partnering with the ABDM APIs. So far, about 745 entities have registered on the ABDM Sandbox.

Talking about ABDM’s role, Dr R S Sharma, CEO, NHA said, “The overarching objective of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission is to deliver health services in an affordable manner with quality and accessibility. These health services should be available everywhere in the country and obviously technology tools will reduce the concept of distance. The system which we are building is an interoperable, open system which is based on open source with open APIs and open standards. So that basically enables every or public player, whosoever wants to integrate with the system to integrate with ABDM.”

Adding further on the progress of integrations done so far, Dr Sharma said, “Out of 27 integrators, 17 integrators are private sector integrators who are actually providing solutions which are compatible with the overall architecture of ABDM. And each application can talk to every other application. So, this is a wonderful architecture which will enable a scalable system.”

The complete list of ABDM partners and their respective integration levels are mentioned at https://abdm.gov.in/home/partners . More information about ABDM Sandbox is available here: https://sandbox.abdm.gov.in/