"Doctors are worried about the sanctity of their consultative discussions, the patient data, and afraid of poaching of patients by the telemedicine etc. service providers and that remains one main cause of hesitancy to get onto one of the commercial offerings (of telemedicine)," Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) told the National Health Authority in their comments on the consultation paper for the Unified Health Interface (UHI). The comments received from four industry bodies - FICCI, Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) on the Unified Health Interface consultation paper were published by the NHA earlier this month. The proposed UHI lays down how third-party applications will interact with the government's National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) - a multi-layered digital health infrastructure that looks to digitise sensitive health data for citizens. The four organisations reviewed and suggested changes to the proposed UHI and its End User Applications, pricing mechanism, enlisting of various healthcare providers, method of verification, and so on. Members in these organisations range from health tech apps like 1MG and Practo to service providers like Amazon Internet Services, Tata Consultancy Services, etc. What was said about the UHI? Open Network NHA: It asked stakeholders about the benefits and risks anticipated in an open network approach to digital health services. The NHA has proposed an Open protocol-based UHI with standards that offer interoperability between various stakeholders. CII suggested: The core products' (like registries…
