Harsh Parikh, Founder, DRiefcase highlights the role of DRiefcase in the management of digital medical records
The next time you pick up your phone to make a payment or take out a micro-loan, you owe to the UPI infrastructure that allows you this convenience in India. And if you believe this was a change for good, then the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (or the ABDM) is another one that will change the way healthcare is delivered in India.
The ABDM, a key project of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is a health information super highway that connects everyone associated with your care with your permission. So, if you are consulting a doctor at a hospital and the doctor wants to access a past health check-up done at any other lab, then the same can be done with a click. The implications of truly connected digital healthcare are immense – better quality of care, superior patient experience, cheaper and faster insurance processing, and ultimately universal health coverage.
But how will all this be possible? You will make it happen, just the way you made UPI happen.
ABDM will work when both citizens and healthcare service providers adopt digital technologies to manage health records. And while healthcare service providers, such as hospitals and labs, have already begun work, and now it is your turn. You need to change the way your health records are managed. To allow the flow of digital health records, ABDM provides every citizen with a unique health account identifier, known as Ayushman Bharat Health Account (or ABHA address), to ensure that the created medical records are issued to the correct individual or accessed by a health information user that has been granted the consent.
All you need to do is create your ABHA account on a PHR app (or Personal health Records), such as DRiefcase.
DRiefcase is the first patient-side app to be fully integrated into ABDM – creation of government-issued ABHA address, managing consents for movement of records and linking existing records into ABDM.
DRiefcase is a pioneer in management of digital medical records, helping users manage their medical records for more than 5 years now. DRiefcase provides secure, easy-to-use access to personal health records, enabling users to maintain their family medical records online and access them anytime in a matter of seconds. It is a patient-centric platform with unmatched focus on personal health records, ensuring ease of upload and fast retrieval of records. DRiefcase is the only health locker in India which has teams that can scan all your records for you, including radiology reports such as X-rays and MRIs, at your house itself.
DRiefcase is also working towards creating products for other stakeholders, such as hospitals, doctors, and other health-tech players, to connect themselves into the ABDM. In fact, DRiefcase was founded with the aim to bridge the information gap that exists between patients and caregivers, and through them, the other stakeholders in the ecosystem, such as pharma companies, insurance companies and governments.
And now with the coming of the ABDM, DRiefcase will be one step closer to achieving that goal.