In a recent development, the Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare inaugurated the 7th National Summit on Good, Replicable Practices & Innovations. This event was conducted digitally through a video conference. The significant launches included the New Health Management Information System (HMIS), Operational Guidelines for Tuberculosis services at Ayushman Bharat-Health and Wellness Centres, and the Operational Guidelines 2020 on Active Case Detection and Regular Surveillance for Leprosy.
About the National Summit
The National Summit on Good, Replicable Practices and Innovations in Public Healthcare Systems in India is convened by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. The summit made its debut in 2013 in Srinagar with a vision to acknowledge, showcase, and document various best practices and innovative strategies in the public healthcare system.
The summits display a wide range of programmatic areas including Reproductive, Maternal, Neonatal, Child Health, and Adolescent Health (RMNCH+A), communicable diseases such as Tuberculosis, Malaria and other vector-borne diseases, and Leprosy, along with new territories of Non-Communicable Disease control programmes. These also encompass innovations that apply systems thinking to healthcare challenges like using IT to fortify the continuum of care and addressing human resource shortages and capacity building issues.
Highlights of the 7th National Summit
A significant highlight of the year 2020 was the contribution of 210 new initiatives by the States and UTs to the National Healthcare Innovation Portal. The portal was designed to serve as a common platform to facilitate the collection and sharing of good practices and innovations which can be replicated.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the country has become self-reliant in manufacturing PPE kits, ventilators, masks, vaccines etc. Evidently, more than 1 million tele-consultations have been held on the e-Sanjeevani digital platform of the Health Ministry. The e-Sanjeevani platform is a doctor-to-doctor telemedicine system under the umbrella of the Ayushman Bharat Health and Wellness Centre (AB-HWCs) programme.
Awards and Recognition
The Department of Health and Family Welfare has been awarded the Digital India award 2020 under the Open Data Champion category for the e-Sanjeevani digital platform. This award, conducted biennially by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) under Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), aims to promote innovation in eGovernance and digital transformation of government service delivery mechanism.
Digital Transformation in Healthcare
The digital transformation has allowed the country to develop a national digital health ecosystem supporting Universal Health Coverage in an efficient, accessible, inclusive, affordable, timely and safe manner. A need was emphasized to involve and integrate grassroots healthcare workers for brainstorming innovations in the healthcare ecosystem, drawing from years of experience and expertise of working with people’s health delivery systems.
Recent Examples of Health Digitisation
The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) is a comprehensive digital health ecosystem encompassing four key features: health ID, personal health records, Digi Doctor, and health facility registry. Additionally, the Aarogya Setu App, aimed at enabling Bluetooth-based contact tracing and mapping of likely hotspots along with dissemination of relevant information about Covid-19, is another step towards digitization in healthcare.
About the Health Management Information System(HMIS)
The HMIS is a Government to Government (G2G) web-based Monitoring Information System designed to monitor the National Health Mission and other Health programmes and provide crucial inputs for policy formulation and appropriate programme interventions.
Furthermore, the HMIS Portal simplifies the flow of physical performance from the Facility level to the Sub-district, District, State and National level using a web-based HMIS interface. The new HMIS offers a seamless online platform through the provision of a broad range of data, information and infrastructure services, aptly leveraging open, interoperable, standards-based digital systems.