ACCESS Health International is an international think tank and advisory group with eight offices across the globe. The organisation’s focus areas include healthcare delivery, healthcare performance, healthcare quality, health finance, health policy, research; health insurance, states, capacity building and ACCESS Health Digital (for Universal Health Coverage).

ACCESS Health Digital works as a strategist arm for all digital health initiatives of ACCESS Health International in India. ACCESS Health Digital has been working closely with public and private partners over the past year, to support the creation of a harmonised roadmap for a comprehensive and integrated Digital Health platform for India. The team has conducted extensive research on ways, the Indian health system can leverage technological advancements and transform into a digitally driven healthcare system.

AN OPPORTUNE TIME TO BEGIN

With recently released National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB) by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), a clear roadmap is being established to implement a common platform to not only integrate existing applications in the health domain but also consolidate the data which has existed in silos, either in public or private healthcare facilities, in India.

In order to enable healthcare industry to converge and transition smoothly from non-standard healthcare industry to a standardised, open yet secure Industry; ACCESS Health Digital has launched the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator (SEA) programme.

THE ACCELERATOR AIMS TO:

• Drive a federated, technology model that can provide required freedom of choice across different stakeholders yet ensures common standards across the country.
• Accelerate adoption of the national digital health blueprint [NDHB] standards and other Government of India notified digital health standards including metadata and data standards [MDDS], systematised nomenclature of medicine [SNOMED], electronic health records [EHR], fast health interoperability resources [FHIR].

HOW SEA PROGRAM WILL HELP NDHB ADOPTION

Access Health Digital has defined “Minimum Viable Product Definitions (MVPs)” namely the eObjects and Microservices. These MVPs are white labelled product definitions that bundle all the NDHB recommended standards in their design specifications. These MVPs are designed by considering deep domain specific knowledge of healthcare applications and processes. These MVPs have been given to the startups and product vendors / participants willing to comply with NDHB standards and become the torch bearers and join the SEA programme.

The SEA aims to serve as the seed crystal to help start the crystallization process in the market. This SEA programme will enable evolution of an open source community and will create a support group that will help each other implement the MVP definitions. Access Health Digital will mentor and create the first cohort of NDHB adopted products by extending domain specific and technical support to this open source community.

ACCESS Health Digital will work with National Resource Centre for EHR Standards [NRCeS CDAC Pune] and software testing and quality council [STQC] to help the SEA members for their NDHB compliance and certification. Wherein NRCeS is the single point of contact for assistance in developing, implementing and using EHR standards in India, and STQC is the software testing and quality council in the country.

BUSINESS NEED AND OBJECTIVE OF SEA PROGRAMME:

ACCESS Health Digital first wrote the concept of the eObjects in the book ‘Health Systems for New India’ published by NITI Aayog. The same eObject concept was detailed out for National Health Agency (NHA) over the last one year. The eObjects now form the heart of the PMJAY 2.0. The Government is promising a faster turnaround time in payments if the claims are submitted in the standard eObjects format. This is the financial lever that will change the game in the healthcare market. Now it is in the interest of the providers to change their HDIS and send the claims in standard eObjects format. Obviously, this creates an opportunity for the digital startups and existing HIS vendors to build eObjects into their products.

ACCESS Health Digital further created HDIS MVP (Minimum Viable Product) based on Microservices Architecture to fulfil the eObjects need. This is a clear breakthrough innovation coming out of its own independent research. The digital startups and HIS vendors can now comply to the eObjects needs by building the Microservices into their information model or by creating a bolt-on layer on their existing system.

THE OBJECTIVES OF THE SEA PROGRAM ARE FOUR-FOLD:

• Minimum Viable Product Definitions (MVP) for various care delivery settings across primary, secondary, tertiary and health insurance segments.
• Stamp of Confidence, ACCESS Health Digital (AHD), SEA will put its stamp on the products that adopt the MVPs. SEA will strongly position the early adopters in its network as NDHB Standards compliant products.
• Mentorship to provide technical and functional mentorship for implementation of the Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) into the partner products and help build the micro services and Application Programming Interface (APIs) together with the product teams of the (SEA) community.
• Market Access, AHD, SEA will act as a catalyst for providing market access in terms of positioning the products for relevant request for proposals (RFPs), tenders, new projects and business partnerships.

Thus, AHD is building an accelerator: a sandbox for innovation and to accelerate adoption of NDHB standards:

START-UP BOOTCAMP FOR SEA COMMUNITY ~ BECOMING A REALITY

The SEA Community has initiated the accelerator programme for all the product vendors who have already signed up. The SEA member community comprises revenue stage, private digital healthcare tech startups, hospital information systems vendors and Government managed healthcare delivery information systems.

NRCeS is the knowledge and resource partner to SEA community.

The uniqueness of the SEA programme is that both the public and private healthcare stakeholders have come together to kickstart the adoption of NDHB standards in their respective healthcare delivery information systems [HDIS] products. The members of the cohort are torchbearers of the very first open source community that is emerging in front of them.

WAY FORWARD:

Over the next six months, the Accelerator will have 15-20 digital startups and a few HIS vendors compliant to NDHB standards and ready to send the clinical, encounter, discharge summary and billing data in standard eObjects format for provider-to-provider and provider- to-payer communications. A new Digital Health Ecosystem is on the anvil! Welcome to the Future.

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