Digitised health care

Draft policy is ambitious but raises privacy concerns

The draft Health Data Management Policy of the National Digital Health Mission has been released for public comment. This is an extremely complex area because of the intersection of sensitive personal data, health care service, associated insurance implications, and medical research. Thus, there are huge commercial and social implications as well as concern about privacy. The pandemic has imposed new paradigms, leading to the explosive increase in online consultation, telemedicine usage, as well as the online ordering of drugs. The mass vaccination of a billion-plus citizens may soon be necessary. There is already a vast amount of digitised health data