Unified Health Interface to go live this week, says R S Sharma

The United Health Interface (UHI), an open and interoperable IT network for digital health in India will go live this week, R S Sharma, CEO of the National Health Authority (NHA), said on Tuesday. 

Sharma was speaking at the 16th edition of India Digital Summit 2022, organised by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). “UHI, which has the potential to transform India’s health ecosystem with interoperability of health services, will go live this week. We are putting UHI as a platform and inviting the entire community to contribute with their feedback,” said Sharma. 

“We are working on it very fast and I believe we will be as successful as United Payments Interface (UPI). UHI is in line with UPI. UPI is a language of money transfer, similarly, UHI is a set of protocols, which is going to create a language of health service delivery,” he added. 

Talking about the Cowin platform, Sharma said that India will be able to provide interoperable, frugal, speedy scalable system. “This will ensure that we can leverage digital health technology to a large extent,” he said. 

NHA chief highlighted that public-private partnership is necessary to ensure a robust healthcare system. The current bottleneck is the digitisation of health records for which we need to ensure that it becomes easy for doctors to inculcate digital habits. We are going to provide a number of tools; a number of tools will be developed in the near future which will make it easy for doctors to go digital and productive.” 

Under the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), the interface shall enable public and private solutions and apps to plug in and be a part of National Digital Health Ecosystem.  According to the government, it will allow users to search, book and avail necessary healthcare services such as tele-consultations or laboratory tests. The system will ensure that only verified healthcare providers join the ecosystem.  

This is likely to unleash a digital health tech revolution with innovations and various services for citizens. In such a manner, healthcare infrastructure and human resources can also be utilised in a more efficient manner across the nation, the government said.