Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts (ABHA):
The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has achieved a major milestone by linking over 104 crore health records with more than 93 crore Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts.
- The mission is strengthening India’s digital health infrastructure by enabling paperless health records, reducing hospital waiting time, and connecting patients, hospitals, doctors and insurers through a unified digital network.
- The Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) is a 14-digit unique health identifier created under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM). It securely links an individual with India’s digital health ecosystem and enables access to digital health services.
- ABHA aims to create a portable, paperless and consent-based digital health record system, allowing citizens to access and share their medical history across ABDM-enabled healthcare facilities.
- ABHA links health records across hospitals, laboratories, insurers and national health programmes with the patient’s consent. It allows individuals to store, access and share their health records digitally. Doctors and healthcare providers can access previous medical records only through revocable and time-bound consent of the patient.
- ABHA enables seamless portability of health records across different healthcare providers and locations, helping patients access services without carrying physical documents.
- Through services like Scan and Share, ABHA enables QR-based OPD registration and digital queue tokens, reducing hospital waiting time from nearly one hour to around 2–5 minutes.
- It connects patients with doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, insurers and digital health applications through a unified and interoperable network.
- ABHA also supports integration with the National Health Claims Exchange (NHCX), helping streamline health insurance claims, reduce discharge delays and improve transparency in claim processing.
- ABHA follows a privacy-by-design approach. Health records are not stored on a central government server and can be shared only with the patient’s consent.
- ABHA helps reduce paperwork, avoid duplication of tests, improve continuity of care, support faster service delivery and strengthen India’s movement towards Universal Health Coverage.
