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

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 makes for hig

Epidemiology Surveillance is a Lever of Change - for implementation of National Digital Health Blueprint and adoption of National Digital Health Ecosystem. Given the vast and variable nature and quality of legacy and operational data being generated in  real time which requires to be captured, any solution adopted requires to essentially ingest these  disparate forms, allowing meaningful options in its use. This becomes a tall order for traditional  architectures like Data Warehouses, that constrain the types of data that can be stored in them,  both in terms of type and quality. Data lakes are the leading edge and evolving architecture that can help store, share and use  electronic health records and other patient data in its ever-expanding variety. Data Lakes open the  possibility of taking Healthcare Analytics to its Next Level by keeping pace with the rapid growth in  types and magnitude of data that needs to be harnessed and made use of. It is important here, to  understand the di

  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 only needs a few cor

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/1vJUIWg971MIVreMrbBhZ3cQ--IpL_bG0/

  Download the Full Report Here. A federated health worker registry is proposed that will be maintained by the Central  Government and will store “identified minimum required informative fields” and will assign  a “unique identification number” for every ASHA worker. The ASHA registry will have  pointers to the state ASHA enrollment repositories or databases (DBT, HR etc) that will  push relevant data to the central registry for every new ASHA enrollment, any information  updation or change in employment status or location. Whenever a new ASHA health worker gets selected for final recruitment, gets enrolled  through an online common cloud-based portal or application by a trained staff appointed  by the district health dept or a private enrollment agency at the PHC or assigned anganwadi  center maintained at village or district level.  The enrollment process mandates ADHAAR card number authentication with the UIDAI  and assigns a unique health worker identification number in the central

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 designed

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 semantic interoperab