Countrywide census project has been launched to develop the NHRR (National Health Resource Repository) by the Union Health Ministry. NHRR will be India’s first registry of authentic and updated geospatial data on all public and private healthcare establishments.
More than twenty lakhs of hospitals, diagnostic labs, clinics, pharmacies, and nursing homes get listed on the integrated health informatics platform, one it gets completed.
The national nodal health agency CBHI (Central Bureau of Health Intelligence) conceptualized the NHRR, depends upon data collected from state governments, union territories and disease control programmes to ensure effective health resource management and allocation.
Particularly in the private sector, deficiencies such as non-reporting and under-reporting of public health information exists to continue.
As per the Senior health ministry officers’ words, above 4,000 trained professionals has started working as enumerators and supervisors to contact every healthcare establishment for collecting details of health infrastructure, human resources, and availability of medical facilities.
The official also shared that the enumerators will do best to finish the data collection process by the end of the year. Timely and correct information is compulsory for utilizing private healthcare infrastructure and facilitating public-private partnerships. However, unavailability of private sector healthcare statistics remains a major challenge to our policymakers. The new registry is expected to fill these lacunae in service delivery which would considerably improve our public health decision-making process,” The government has requested public and private healthcare institutions to furnish details of physical infrastructure, medical equipment status, quality control, and technological certification. Health institutions can also register online through the National Centre of Geo-informatics portal.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is working as a backing partner for NHRR project, as the technology partner. NHRR will also be planned to be linked with Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission to speed up hospital empanelment and private sector engagement. Health Ministry is sure that it will establish a reliable, unified registry showing the distribution pattern of health facilities and services between cities and rural areas.
To digitize healthcare information to enable interoperability, the central government has also been adopting a slew of measures and the NHRR is seen as the latest addition to them. A few months ago, the health ministry modified the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules of 1945 to make a digital declaration mechanism mandatory for all drug manufacturers. The move aims at building a comprehensive, real-time database on the domestic drug industry.
Niti Aayog, government think-tank also proposed the creation of a National Health Stack to make both personal health documents and service provider records available on cloud-based services using the Internet in July. Furthermore, Finalisation of the draft of the proposed Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act to establish a nodal agency for creating a regulatory framework for digital healthcare data was done.
