Digital Health Records and Patient Data

Digitization of health records has been underway for some time now, although significant progress must continue. The high quality of data aggregated becomes the foundation for machine learning systems and assistive technology, publicly available as products, devices and services. The quality and volume of data are necessary conditions to create a thriving ecosystem of research, development and commercialization.

Digital data ecosystems around health records and medical records bring up important data collection topics, consent systems, processing and analysis of data, sharing of data, data security and the entire spectrum of issues in data governance. It needs more robust conversations around the responsible usage of records, data privacy and the agency available to the data subject - the patient around controlling their data. And along with legislation around data protection, it is also necessary to examine whether purpose-specific sectoral approaches are to be adopted for the healthcare domain.

The ABDM effort has spurred the development of a massive data-centric ecosystem, which, along with the UHI, will enable search, discovery and access to health services. While the entry of private enterprises into this space is inevitable, the patient’s needs should be balanced correctly against the other stakeholders’ requirements in the ecosystem. The ability to have a robust data security stance which elevates the reuse and sharing of data while mitigating the risks of harm arising from data breaches is a high-priority topic which requires domain experts to come together to build best practices, guidelines and quickly adopted protocols.

This talk is an introduction to digitization efforts and a high-level view of why digitization is both important and complex. It is part of a series which will examine some of these challenges and bring together stakeholders to discuss how we can do better.