#Opensource Healthcare Community for #DigitalHealth #Ecosystem [OpenHealthCODE]

Lesson from the Covid19 Pandemic – Leveraging Telemedicine and Digital Health to offer 'Appropriate Care' in Rural India Download Here!   The Second Wave of Covid19, in a manner of speaking, was a ‘Baptism by fire’ for Public Health Governance in India. Besides streamlining of provisioning of material resources, one of the key lessons learnt in managing the crisis was clearly, that ‘Appropriate Care’ i.e. Triage was able to take care of about 80% of patients reporting Covid-like symptoms and allowing them to be treated with simple and minimal protocols, at home without overburdening Hospitals in the secondary and Tertiary care segment and thus ensuring better outcomes and better patient experience. Resources could remain available for suitable cases. Less could Indeed be more! Now that we see the disease making inroads into Rural India which is relatively poorly served in terms of first line of care, and anticipate larger numbers that need to be provided ‘Appropriate Care’ we n...

This document presents the design specifications for electronic claim  objects and associated standard processes for their exchange between  Payers and Providers, through a Health Claim Platform that was  recommended in the report “Common IT Infrastructure  for Health Insurance Claims management” by IRDA-NHA joint  working group.  The health claim platform is intended to improve current  claim processes, enforce transparency and facilitate on time provider  payments for Health insurance Claims in India. Usage of Standard  Electronic Claim related objects will facilitate auto adjudication of  claims by both Public and Private Health Insurance Payers with reduced  operational costs. eClaims Objects - Health Claims Platform Payer eObjects Specifications: eClaims Object, Claims Response etc. eDischarge Summary Object : Pick the eDischarge Object from Provider eObjects v2 Standard Value Sets for eClaims Objects Standard Value Sets for eD...

Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator [SEA] OpenHealthCODE  is a a not for profit think tank working on NDHB Digital Health Standards for India. We run a Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator [SEA] for helping Indian HealthTech startups and vendors to implement Open Digital Health Standards that are applicable globally. #AtmaNirbharBharat #VocalForLocal SEA Silver Club Silver Club has implemented the Standards and achieved our  Stamp of Confidence . https://openhealthcode.blogspot.com/2021/07/stamp-of-confidence.html SEA implements the eObjects Interoperability framework. eObjects were first written by Prof Dennis Streveler and Dr Pankaj Gupta in a white paper in Nov 2018 that was published by Niti Aayog in the book  Health Systems for New India, Chapter 5 - Reimagining India's Digital Health Landscape Wiring the Indian Health Sector in Nov 2019. SEA Objectives SEA Cohort 1 SEA Cohort 2 In late October 2020, India's National Health Authority' Market ACCESS Program [MAP] put 1...

Since the start of the Millennium, India has been trying to overcome the problem of interoperability and fragmented healthcare delivery ecosystem across states, health policies and vertical health programs to deliver seamless or uninterrupted continuum of care. With the launch of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (PMJAY), that covers & provides free healthcare to approximately 40 % of the Indian population, it has become critical to identify each patient uniquely. The criticality for unique identification of individuals got highlighted when India was hit by the COVID 19 pandemic – when patient tracking and relevant health information on comorbidities was not available for effectively and efficiently executing surveillance. States and government could only collect aggregated data in non-standard and an unstructured format via door to door screening, which was extremely inefficient and poorly suited for response planning and to effectively combat a pandemic of this size and scale. ...

The Public and Private Health System in India is struggling with multiplicity of information systems being used at central as well as at state level. Each of these systems is unable to exchange data and information with each other. To overcome similar challenges across ministries, the Ministry of Communication and Technologies initiated semantic standardization across various domains under Metadata and Data Standards (MDDS) project. The intent was to promote the growth of e-Governance within the country by establishing interoperability across e-Governance applications for seamless sharing of data and services. MDDS for health domain was created by adopting global standards in such a way that existing applications could be easily upgraded to the MDDS standards.  The exercise yielded approximately 1000 data elements. These data elements were expected to serve as the common minimum data elements for development of IT applications for various sub domains of health care. The need for th...

What is a Registry? A registry is an organized system or database that collects, stores uniformed data or information about an entity like patient, person , or facility etc and is kept updated at all times to act as “Single Source of Truth” for the entity in question. The data facilitated by the registry can be accessed as service by information technology applications or by the government for planning initiatives and governance. How a Registry is different from a Directory? A registry is an official record keeping database which not only identifies an entity uniquely but also proves its existence in the ecosystem in question. E.g.: ADHAAR- A person must be listed in AADHAAR registry to be able to verify his/her identification as an Indian Citizen with authentic demographic details. Directory on the other hand does not required to be an official or comprehensive, but mere a collection of data without uniquely identifying entities listed in it and do not serve as “single ...

Overview  With a proactive concern for patient safety and quality of care, The Indian Medical Council Act 1956 prohibits a person other than a medical practitioner enrolled on a State Medical Register or the Indian Medical Register (IMR) to practice in India. Every New Medical Graduate must Register with the respective State Medical Council Register and is then allocated a registration number. With that Registration Number, the Doctor can Practice anywhere in India.  As it works Currently, apart from MCI’s National level Indian Medical Register (IMR), different state councils have their own medical Registers. The MCI then compiles data received from state medical councils. Problem Statement  Healthcare being a State Subject, a degree of latency creeps into the system. However, when a Doctor migrates to any other part of India, he/she often overlook to update the State Register and also similarly about recent Qualifications, Degrees, Certifications, etc. This...

  Minimum viable product (MVP) is a strategy that has gained rapid and widespread acceptance among the startup community. Used effectively, it can be a compelling strategy to evaluate product-market fit, which often is the largest risk facing a new medical software company. The idea of MVP is to focus a product or service on the key value that it provides to a customer.  MVP is about the minimal functionality that will do the job. The MVP will fail if you go any lower or remove any functionality from the MVP. So the trick is that if the product can work without any Functionality - please remove it from the MVP. Figuring out whether organizations or individuals will adopt the product often is the largest challenge facing new companies. The goal of MVP is to test the adoption and payment assumptions as early as possible. MVP is that product which has just those basic functionality that allows you to ship the product out.   A Healthcare delivery organization typically o...

The need of a national level drug database has been recognized as a priority by the government in recent times. Even though it has gained government's attention it will take some time for a national level Drug Index to be available. Hence, we recommend the use of National Formulary of India (NFI) as a standard drug database. NFI has been adopted from World Health Organization (WHO) Model Formulary. For the promotion of rational use of drugs, the Indian Pharmacopiea Commision publishes National Formulary of India (NFI) at regular time intervals. The Formulary enlists the generic drugs, their classification, dosage, availability, indications, contradictions,precautions. To facilitate the use of NFI, the branded drugs can be mapped against the specific generic drugs or generic drug combinations and use relevant MDDS data elements and Code directories to prescribe their usage in a standardized format.  CSV Format NFI:   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vJUIWg971MIVr...

eObjects were first written by Prof Dennis Streveler and Dr Pankaj Gupta in a white paper in Nov 2018 that was published by Niti Aayog in the book Health Systems for New India, Chapter 5 - Reimagining India's Digital Health Landscape Wiring the Indian Health Sector in Nov 2019. OpenHealthCODE Strategy Council defined the details of the National Digital Health Blueprint building blocks - Minimum viable products including the eObjects and microservices architecture to comply with the NDHB Standards.  OpenHealthCODE  runs a Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator to accelerate the implementation of the NDHB Standards through these building blocks.  The eObjects have now been adopted by Joint working Group of National Health Authority NHA and Insurance Regulatory Development Authority IRDAI Sub group on common IT infrastructure, in its report published on 11 Sep 2019 and will be built into the India’s national Health Claims platform. [ NHA IRDA Press Release ] The eObjects were...

Immediate usecases:  ePrescription and eEncounter FHIR based Objects for Telemedicine interoperability.  The same eObjects can also be used for Referral across Primary, Secondary and Tertiary care. Epidemiological Surveillance is the next big thing. We will need eEncounter, ePrescription and eDischarge Objects to fetch the data from disparate OPD/IPD HIS/EMR systems. eObjects act as a Standard Output Format in these use cases. The need for the eObjects arose because most of the Healthcare-IT applications are being developed without any standards by different agencies and vendors in the public and private sector in India. Each application is developed for standalone use without much attention to semantic interoperability. Later when the thought of interoperability emerges – it becomes difficult to connect the systems and make them talk to each other because they were never designed for that purpose.   Even if technical and organizational interoperability is done the semant...