Indian technology lobby group iSpirt is running a pilot with the National Cancer Grid that lets patients share their health data just as easily as one can make UPI payments. Called a consent manager, the tool is modelled after UPI – which iSpirt evangelised – and is one of the parts of the Health Stack. iSpirt revealed the pilot in a webinar held on May 23; frontman Sharad Sharma, and ‘volunteers’ Kiran Anandampillai and Siddharth Shetty presented the webinar and demo’d the product. Instrumental to the project is Swasth Alliance, a telemedicine group led by Curefit founder Mukesh Bansal, Shashank ND (Practo), and Prashant Tandon (1mg). Health-tech companies mFine, PharmEasy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and iSpirt are among its supporters/partners. Swasth Alliance is piggy-backing on the popularity of Aarogya Setu, which now has 115 million users. Formed weeks after telemedicine was legalised, it is among the five telemedicine providers listed on the Aarogya Setu app. The alliance is “built on the Bharat Health Stack for interoperability and scalability”. The alliance has Amitabh Kant (CEO, NITI Aayog), Indu Bhushan (CEO, Ayushman Bharat and National Health Authority), and Nandan Nilekani (former Infosys, former UIDAI) on its advisory council. NITI Aayog’s Arnab Kumar, who spearheaded Aarogya Setu’s development from the government, had said that the app could be an “initial building block for India Health Stack”, and “everything else apart from COVID-19 which could be linked to telemedicine, tele-consultation” could be part of the app. 1mg’s Tandon himself was among the…
