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Health Ministry holds national consultation on establishment of National eHealth Authority
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Ramesh Shankar, Mumbai
August 30 , 2016
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Making the ball rolling towards the establishment of the proposed
National eHealth Authority (NeHA), the Union health ministry recently
conducted a National Consultation on NeHA under the chairmanship of
secretary, ministry of health, to give a final shape to the Authority.
The proposed body will be the nodal authority responsible for
development of an Integrated Health Information System (including
Telemedicine and mHealth) in India, while collaborating with all the
stakeholders, viz., healthcare providers, consumers, healthcare
technology industries, and policymakers.
Senior officials from
ministry of health & family welfare, and representatives from more
than 23 states attended the National Consultation. There were also
representatives from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Association
bodies (IMA, FICCI, NATHEALTH and NASSCOM), private healthcare providers
and healthcare. IT experts along with vendors also participated in the
meeting.
In the meeting, secretary, ministry of health, BP
Sharma mentioned, “We have many mobile health applications which are
successfully using information technology to monitor many diseases”. He
emphasized that NeHA will be an important body and it will look into
overall policy standards to bring IT and health care together.
Prof
S N Sarbadhikari, project director, CHI presented the concept note
outlining the aim, vision and goal of NeHA. He said the ministry of
health is taking various initiatives in the areas related to use of ICT
(Information and Communications Technology) in healthcare. In order to
guide and support India’s journey in eHealth and consequent realization
of benefits of ICT intervention in health sector in an orderly way, the
ministry proposes to set up NeHA as a statutory body for promotional,
regulatory and standards related roles.
Attainment of high
quality health services for citizen through cost-effective and secure
use of information and communication technologies in health and
health-related fields is its vision and its goal is to ensure
development and promotion of eHealth ecosystem in India for enabling the
organisation, management and provision of effective people-centric
health services to all in an efficient, cost effective and transparent
manner.
Prof Sarbadhikari mentioned that till 2015, the ministry
had received 500 comments and suggestions on NeHA, which were very
useful for further improvement. He also explained about National eHealth
policy for health adoption in the country which includes data
management, privacy and security, policy guidelines for health records
of patients visiting the health facilities.
Once in place, the
Authority will act as a promotional, regulatory and standards setting
organisation to guide and support India’s journey in e-Health and
consequent realization of benefits of ICT intervention in health sector
in an orderly way. It will be responsible for enforcing the laws &
regulations relating to the privacy and security of the patients health
information & records.
One of the major goals of the
Authority is to guide the adoption of e-Health solutions at various
levels and areas in the country in a manner that meaningful aggregation
of health and governance data and storage/exchange of electronic health
records happens at various levels in a cost-effective manner. It will
facilitate integration of multiple health IT systems through health
information exchanges.
NeHA has been envisaged to support
formulation of policies, strategies and implementation plan blueprint
(National eHealth Policy/Strategy) for coordinated eHealth adoption in
the country by all players; regulation and accelerated adoption of
e-health in the country by public and private care providers and other
players in the ecosystem; and to establish a network of different
institutions to promote eHealth and Telemedicine/remote
healthcare/virtual healthcare and such other measures.
It has
been envisaged to support formulation and management of all health
informatics standards for India; laying down data management, privacy
& security policies, standards and guidelines in accordance with
statutory provisions; to promote setting up of state health records
repositories and health information exchanges (HIEs); and to deal with
privacy and confidentiality aspects of electronic health records (EHR).
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