Dpis Could Be Part Of India's Soft Power Projection: Ex-Ceo Of Nha

(MENAFN- Live Mint) "The global proliferation of digital public infrastructures (DPIs) can be part of India's soft power projection, in turn helping“increase our influence” around the world, said RAM Sewak Sharma, former chief executive of the Centre's National health Authority (NHA). In an interview on the sidelines of the first Digital Public Dialogues, a government-backed discussion forum in Delhi on Monday, Sharma underlined the importance of DPIs, which were a part of India's agenda during its G20 presidency that concluded on 10 September.“China has a huge amount of money, which can be used to influence global stakeholders. What we have is knowledge, through which we have created our DPIs. This is our soft power-in a way, we try and help the world solve their problems across different countries. By doing this, we increase our influence-it's not always in terms of gaining in a limited monetary sense. One should look at gains from a thought leadership point of view, that's more important,” said Sharma.During his keynote speech at the forum, Sharma highlighted the need to showcase DPIs to other nations.“I have showcased the effectiveness of our centralized, connected attendance system in Morocco-it's only when we showed it in action that stakeholders in Morowere excited about adopting it. It's very important to showcase our technologies in action,” he added.Sharma, who led the development of India's health stack, added that proliferation and adoption of India's central health technologies is progressing at a steady pace.“There is always a gap between the development of technology, and its adoption. Whenever a novel technology is developed, it takes a couple of years to proliferate at a field level. This process starts slowly, and then picks up pace in an expedited manner. The same has been seen with UPI-it was launched in 2016, but the real, drastic pace of adoption grew only in the past two years,” he said.The national health stack, organized under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September 2021, already has multiple tools and artifacts available to stakeholders of the healthcare industry, including a personal health record applicatio and the Healthcare Information Exchange - Consent Manager (HIE-CM).However, the mainstream proliferation of these tools will require both awareness and a regulatory push, Sharma added.“Adoption may happen voluntarily, as well as by prescribing. There's nothing wrong with prescribing, either. If a hospital wants to see a person's longitudinal health record, they'll need it to see health records belonging to other hospitals as well. It can't be that every party should be able to see others' records, but not share their own data. There should be some incentive for participation in such a program. To build such an ecosystem, you need regulatory approaches, as well as awareness, as crucial aspects,” Sharma said.To incentivize this adoption, the NHA announced Digital Health Incentive Schemes (DHIS) of up to ₹4 crore for hospitals under ABDM.“This is actually very important from the perspective of building a database and AI capabilities, as well as figuring out the prevalence of variproblems in our country,” the top executive said.The adoption is steadily growing, too-on 16 August, the Karnataka state government announced two microsites in order to amplify awareness and spread greater adoption of digital public infrastructure among the state's private healthcare infrastructure.Such initiatives will be increasingly crucial going forward, Sharma said, adding during his fireside chat,“Adoption of the tech stack will be beneficial for every stakeholder involved-healthcare providers, insurance providers, intermediaries, and most of all the patient, since this will enable interoperability of health records, and limit silos.”

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