Thursday, April 16, 2020

Health Systems for a New India: eObjects Building Blocks



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.

ACCESS Health Digital 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. ACCESS Health Digital 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.

The eObjects were designed for interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem on a federated architecture. eEncounter, eDischarge Summary Objects are for Provider-to-Provider interoperability; such that the data can flow across healthcare facilities, State HIE and National Data Lake. Whereas the eClaims Object creates a Financial Lever for the market. If the providers submit the claims in standard eClaims Object format then the turnaround time for their payments can be expected to be faster. Clearly eObjects are an innovative breakthrough.

This is very similar to what happened in the FinTech revolution in India where Government of India created the Unified Payment Interface UPI platform and then created the BHIM App and released the related Application Programming Interface APIs to the market. Later the Market used the API’s and built the hugely successful Paytm, Googlepay, Phonepe wallets. In 3 years the UPI transactions went from negligible to 1 Billion transactions per month.

Financial lever and strong governance for digital health transformation, plays a vital role in ensuring successful outcomes of such undertakings. India would do well to heed this truth. 

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