Unified Health Interface:
The Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare launched the Unified Health Interface (UHI).
- Unified Health Interface is an interoperable digital network under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM).
- UHI aims to solve for information asymmetry, accessibility to health services and wider choice of verified providers across services without being tied to a single application.
- It was launched as the service layer of the ABDM.
- UHI operates through open protocols on a core Gateway of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, developed and maintained by the National Health Authority (NHA).
- When a citizen uses a UHI-enabled app to search for a health service, the request is routed through the Gateway to registered service providers.
- The entire journey from discovery and booking to fulfillment is facilitated through a common language, irrespective of the platform used to seek or provide the service.
- The network uses Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) as the patient identifier, the Healthcare Professionals Registry (HPR) and Health Facility Registry (HFR) for provider verification, and the Health Information Exchange for consent-based data sharing.
- Key Objectives:
- Interoperability: Patients and providers can use any UHI-enabled platform to seek or offer care, removing the dependency on shared platforms that currently limits digital health access.
- Fair discoverability: Every verified healthcare provider, regardless of size, geography, or platform, has an equal opportunity to be found on the network.
- Verification: Only verified doctors and facilities credentialed through ABDM registries (HPR and HFR) are permitted to participate, ensuring citizens can trust the network.
- UHI is built on open specifications accessible to all, enabling developers of any size to build and offer health applications in any language, on any devices.
