Although National Heath Stack (NHS) envisions that the patient would control their data, the challenge would be managing consent of unlettered/under-educated population of India, stated HIMSS Asia-Pacific's India chapter in their submission (see below) on Niti Aayog's NHS document released in July 2018. To provide this kind of control, patient identification and user identity management need to be combined with provider identification (doctor or patient registry) and entitlements management (appropriately-grained), said the organisation. HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) is an American organisation working on implementation of IT in the health industry. Niti Aayog had floated the National Health Stack paper as "implementation framework" for Ayushman Bharat. After holding consultations on it, the Ministry of Health formed a committee under former UIDAI chairman and former MeitY secretary J. Satyanarayan, which drafted the National Digital Health Blueprint 2019. MediaNama is summarising submissions made to the original Health Stack paper, which we obtained via RTI. You can here the the other submissions here. The following are the key issues and points made by HIMSS Asia-Pacific India Chapter. A single registry for India? According to HIMMS APAC-India Chapter, a single central registry may not be optimal for the population of India. Instead, it may be useful to consider 2-3 level hierarchy of person registries, with the central registry consolidating registrations from state registries and from small administrative divisions of groups of healthcare organizations. Better indexing and searching tools: This would permit lookup of person details across geographic and administrative boundaries while localising…
