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New Delhi : “ Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has great potential to improve delivery of healthcare services. India is committed to reforms in health service delivery using ICT under Digital India Programme of Government of India,” said J P Nadda, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare during his address to Global Digital Health Partnership Summit, at Canberra, Australia, on February 19, 2018. Nadda spoke on “Making Digital Health Services a Priority in Healthcare Reform”.
Greg Hunt, Minister of Health, Australia, Tim Kelsey, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Digital Health Agency, Ms Glenys Beauchamp, Secretary, Department of Health, Australia, along with delegates from Canada, Hongkong, Indonesia, Italy, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, United Kingdom, USA and WHO were also present at the summit.
Nadda stressed on the importance for building digital health ecosystem partnerships with private healthcare providers, academia, health IT practitioners, industry, patient groups and regulatory bodies. He stated that adoption of Digital Technology for improvement of governance has always been central to polity of the Indian government, according to a PIB release.
He informed that there are four major areas where India has implemented Digital Technology in healthcare: Towards improving health service delivery, towards improving compliance of people to health & care, engaging citizens in partnering with government for planning and management of health services delivery, and Improving governance.
Nadda also informed the participations that the Health Ministry has rolled out largescale IT systems in different areas of healthcare ecosystem such as integrated health surveillance programme, public health management, hospital information system, supply chain management, online services, tele-medicine, and programme monitoring. “Such initiatives include systems for obtaining reliable information and near real-time data for policy making, ensuring efficient programme and service delivery,” Nadda said.
Speaking about some of the initiatives of the Health Ministry, Nadda said that India’s National Health Portal (NHP) provides authentic information related to healthcare to citizens. He said that NHP is functioning as Citizen Portal for Healthcare providing health-related information to citizens and stakeholders in different Indian languages. “Total web users for national health portal till date are over 2.6 Million and over 2.2 Million calls were made by citizens till date. Content of the portal is currently available in 6 Indian languages- and it is planned to add 6 more languages,” Nadda elaborated