Govt, AWS working on Health IDs, will maintain digital health records

Your complete patient record could soon be stored in one platform, thanks to an ambitious plan involving Amazon’s Cloud computing unit and the central government.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has earlier provided the Cloud infrastructure of major India Stack applications from the digitisation service, DigiLocker, to the Covid-19 vaccine registration web portal, CoWIN has now embarked upon initiatives that include creating digital health IDs and “longitudinal health records” of citizens.

These would be built as a part of repurposed CoWIN and Arogya Setu platforms, a senior executive said.

AWS has been a cloud computing partner for various state and central government agencies in India for scalable, on-demand services in the fields of education, transport, and farming.

But when it comes to healthcare, the government is focusing on integrating the portals and platforms that have been operating in silos.

CoWIN, launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, has been repurposed into a universal vaccination platform called U-WIN.

It may fulfil the vaccination needs of around 100 million people including children between zero and six years of age, pregnant women and lactating mothers.

The platform is already operational and offers 12 other vaccines including diphtheria, Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG), polio, and tetanus, said Pankaj Gupta, leader - public sector enterprises and government, AWS India.

A notable addition is the recently launched Poshan Tracker, a national initiative under the National Nutrition Mission. 

The platform monitors nutrition for the target group of 100 million, encompassing children, expectant women, and lactating mothers. 

Real-time data is currently sourced from around 1.4 million Anganwadi centres nationwide, Gupta said.

Apart from the health records, AWS is also working on the National Health Authority’s Unified Health Interface (UHI). Gupta said this would create a foundational layer for other app developers, similar to the UPI.

The government wants to build a backbone for the public healthcare system through the UHI project.