Vision 2035- India’s Public Health Surveillance by 2035

NITI Aayog has released a white paper titled “Vision 2035: Public Health Surveillance in India”. The white paper is a step forward towards strengthening the health systems. The paper contributes to the strengthening of the country’s health systems by suggesting mainstream surveillance using individual electronic health records as the basis. Before this, the Health Vertical of the NITI Aayog released ‘Health Systems for New India: Building blocks – Potential Pathways to Reforms’ in November, 2019.

Vision of the White Paper

  • Making the public health surveillance system of India more responsive and predictive for enhancing preparedness for action at all levels.
  • Ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of people through a citizen-friendly public health surveillance system.
  • Improving the sharing of information mechanism between the Centre and states for better detection, prevention, and control of a disease.
  • Providing regional and global leadership in managing events constituting a public health emergency of international concern.

Building blocks 2035 vision

Four building blocks have been envisaged for this vision-

  • An interdependent system of Governance structure between the Centre and States.
  • Enhanced use of new data collection and sharing mechanisms for surveillance based on citizen-centric Electronic Health Records (EHR) with a unique health identifier (UHID). The existing disease surveillance data and information from periodic surveys will complement this information.
  • Enhanced use of artificial intelligence, new data analytics, machine learning, and data science.
  • Advanced health informatics.

Key Points to remember for UPSC Prelims

  • This paper is a joint effort of the Health Vertical, NITI Aayog, and Institute for Global Public Health, University of Manitoba, Canada.
  • Technical experts from the Government of India, states, and international agencies also contributed to the paper.
  • It also uses lessons learned from global best practices including case-studies from several countries including the UK, the US, and Thailand.

The next step of the paper is expected to be the creation of a road-map or blueprint for action, as it has not mentioned funding and budget requirements.

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