UPI-like interface for healthcare services may go live this week

United Health Interface is a set of protocols that is going to create a language of health service delivery

The United Health Interface (UHI), which will allow the interoperability of health services like the united payments interface (UPI) has done for payments, will go live this week.

Dr R S Sharma, CEO of National Health Authority (NHA), said: “UHI will go live this week. We are putting UHI as a platform and inviting the entire community to contribute with their feedback. We are working on it very fast and I believe we will be as successful as UPI (United Payments Interface).”

“UHI is in line with UPI. UPI is a language of money transfer, similarly, UHI is a set of protocols, which is going to create a language of health service delivery,”he added.

Sharma was speaking at the 16th edition of India Digital Summit 2022 organised by Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). Privacy and data protection was a recurrent focus of the first day of the summit which adopted the theme of ‘Supercharging start-ups’ for this edition.

“Privacy is not a zero sum game. It is a typical myth that to have privacy you have to sacrifice some functionalities. We have worked in a federated architecture which means we don't put the data in one place as it can become a single point of failure,” said Dr Sharma.

Google India MD and IAMAI Chairman Sanjay Gupta said, “We have to ensure privacy and safety of people on the internet. Winning the trust of a billion Indians is going to be critical and we can't leave our doors open to bad actors and leave it to law enforcement to bring them to book.”

“Start-ups will play a pivotal role in achieving a trillion-dollar economy by 2025 from 250 billion dollars currently. Today, startups employ half a million people in India. That means, we need to focus on the right enablers for the growth -- regulatory framework, right infrastructure, to ensure digital economy can grow equitably. Also, we need to ensure a safer internet,” he added.

UIDAI CEO Saurabh Garg said that the next leg of Aadhaar based innovations will be in areas like confidential computing, quantum computing-led cybersecurity infrastructure, faster biometric solutions and blockchain based products to make the authentication system more decentralised and secure.

The Aadhaar chief said that over 50 million Aadhaar authentications are taking place per day and over 400 million last-mile banking transactions are being done every month through Aadhaar-enabled Payment System (AePS).

He reiterated that for individual residents Aadhaar authentication is free and will always remain free. Recently, UIDAI had slashed the price for authentication to Rs 3 from Rs 20 per instance to enable entities to leverage its infrastructure for providing ease of living to people through various services and benefits.