

As a precautionary measure, the digital grid on which the hospital functioned was shut down according to a report in The Hindu. It is important to note that in September this year, Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) in Puducherry suffered a ransomware attack, crippling its teleconsultation services. But what happens when a data breach takes place? Or even worse, what happens if any of the health data of Indians get shared with third parties with links to hostile foreign governments? What then?” asks Kamalavelan, whose group works on building awareness on technology and its impact on governance and society. “The startups will be working with analytics based on AI, providing the analysis layer for the NHS.
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“It’s a hard business where the MNCs have to be accurate with the data being collected, provide 24/7 service to hospitals and avoid cybersecurity risks,” says Kamalavelan, the secretary of the Free Software Hardware Movement (FSHM), an advocacy group based out of Puducherry. With so much data at play, multinational companies (MNCs) from the IT sector and startups will get involved as well, say experts. These numbers are only expected to grow as more private entities, such as hospital chains, diagnostic centres, Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies, health data management companies, insurance companies, join the NHS to develop applications and services, catering to hospitals and users. But will our health data be secure? Are there checks and balances in place to ensure private entities do not misuse our health data?Īs of March this year, about 374 private entities have empanelled with the NHS, according to a response from the NDHM to RTI queries filed by Srinivas Kodali, a researcher on open data.

The NDHM hopes that having the health data of 1.3 billion Indians digitally stored will put the country at the forefront of medical research in the world. This will make the NHS one of the largest health databases in the world. It will also create the framework to allow the health data to be shared across all health programmes of the Union government. The NHS will create the frameworks for all health data of Indians to be made available for medical research and make the health data available for predictive analytics by private entities to aid policymaking. It will form the building blocks on which a universal health protection scheme under the Pradhan Mantri-Rashtriya Swasthya Suraksha Mission (PM-RSSM) will be built. It says that the NHS will create the master health data of the nation in the form of Health IDs. The blueprint for the NHS, titled ‘National Health Stack: Strategy and Approach,’ was released in 2018. The NHS has an ambitious and hard task ahead of it. NHS is considered to be the building block for the digital infrastructure, on which the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) will function. This is where the National Health Stack (NHS) comes in.
