On 29 June 2026 the Union Health and Family Welfare Minister launched the Drug Registry under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission to standardise medicine-related information across India’s healthcare ecosystem.
Key features
- Unified drug repository: single source of truth providing standardised drug codes for generics, branded medicines and substances.
- Coverage: over 123,000 branded drugs; over 10,000 generic drugs; over 29,000 substances indexed with standardised codes.
- Search and identification: searchable by generic name, brand name, substance and manufacturer.
Technical standards & integration
- Semantic standard: adopts SNOMED CT for terminology-level interoperability.
- Collaborating agencies: developed with the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) and NRCeS, Pune.
- APIs and systems: provides open APIs for integration with HMIS, e-prescription platforms, doctor-facing apps and other ABDM-compliant solutions.
Position within ABDM
- Core registry: one of four ABDM core registries alongside ABHA Registry (Ayushman Bharat Health Account), Healthcare Professional Registry (HPR) and Health Facility Registry (HFR).
- Objective: to reduce inconsistent naming, duplication and data-entry variability across health IT systems.
IASPOINT Booster Facts
- CDSCO role: national regulator for pharmaceuticals and medical devices under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
- SNOMED CT: international clinical terminology maintained by SNOMED International for consistent clinical data exchange.
- ABDM components: registries operate with consent manager and federated health information exchange via APIs.