Our India’s public healthcare system today suffers from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). It is restless (to start banner programmes) has trouble concentrating (on their execution), and acts on impulse (to move on to the next banner scheme or botch an old one). If you’ve received the Covid vaccine in India using your Aadhaar card as proof of identity, there’s a fair chance that a Unique Health ID (UHID) has been generated under your name. Never mind if no consent was taken. The overall number matters: 165 million IDs created so far, of which 127 million came through the CoWIN portal meant to facilitate Covid vaccination. The race to create the payments success story in health care is on: A Universal Health Interface (UHI) for healthcare - like UPI for payments - into which multiple care providers can plug in via APIs. As our reports today, 27 entities, including 17 private players, have signed up to be integrated into UHI. These include old, established providers like Apollo Hospitals, Fortis Group’s SRL Labs; new healthtechs like eka.care and DRiefcase, and fintechs like Bajaj Finserv and Paytm. In January 2021, the National Health Authority got a new CEO, whose initial job was to marry India’s existing, ambitious insurance scheme, PM-JAY, and the chameleonic National Digital Health Mission. But as things stand today, PM-JAY has become opaque. Its public dashboards, which gave real-time, country-wide data, have been taken down. A review of its annual budget shows the insurance scheme, which has benefited millions of families, utilised only Rs 2,681 crore of its allocated budget of Rs 6,400 crore for the year ended March 2021. A year after He (CEO) took over, it’s all about UHI and the number of IDs and integrations. For all you know, something new will crop up on 15 August 2022, which will supersede UHI. But for now, let’s get to The MMS article on the subject matters, which does a fine job of putting the NDHM chaos in perspective.
