Public Health Data Architecture : Daily Current Affairs

Relevance: GS-2: Issues relating to the development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health.

Key phrases: Health Data, NDHM, NFHS, Annual Health Survey, NNMB, Digital Privacy.

Why in News?

Needed, a public health data architecture for India.

What is Public health data?

Health data is any data relating to the health of an individual patient or collective population. This information is gathered from a series of health information systems (HIS) and other technological tools utilized by health care professionals, insurance companies and government organizations.
Public health data is any data "related to health conditions, reproductive outcomes, causes of death, and quality of life" for an individual or population. Health data includes clinical metrics along with environmental, socioeconomic, and behavioral information pertinent to health and wellness.

Various survey conducted in India to collected Public health data:

National Family Health Survey (NFHS): The NFHS is a large-scale survey, and multiple rounds of NFHS have been conducted since 1992 in representative sample households throughout India2. It is coordinated by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) as the nodal agency, Mumbai, under the stewardship of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India. Till now, five rounds of this survey have been conducted, NFHS-1 (1992-1993), NFHS-2 (1998-1999), NFHS-3 (2005-2006), NFHS-4 (2015-2016) and NFHS-5 (2019-2020).
District Level Household Survey (DLHS); The DLHS is a household survey conducted at the district level. Like NFHS, the nodal agency for DLHS also is the IIPS, Mumbai. The survey was focussed on generating quality data on reproductive and child health in India at the district level. The DLHS and NFHS, on the contrary, had different cross-sectional sample for each round conducted
Annual Health Survey (AHS): The AHS is implemented by the Office of the Registrar General of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, and sponsored by the MoHFW. The AHS is the largest sample survey in the world.
National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB): NNMB was established by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in collaboration with respective state governments in 1972 in 10 States with ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, as the coordinating centre. The mandate of the survey was to collect and generate good-quality data on diet and nutritional status of the communities in the urban, rural and tribal areas.Another main objective was to assess the ongoing national nutrition programmes regularly.
Sample registration system: The SRS is a demographic survey for providing reliable annual estimates of infant mortality rate, birth rate, death rate and other fertility and mortality indicators at the national and sub-national levels. Office of the Registrar General, India conducted the SRS survey.

National Health Stack

NITI AAYOG unveiled the blue print of National Health Stack, a shared digital healthcare infrastructure. NHS is digital infrastructure built with the aim of making the health insurance system more transparent and robust, while factoring in the uniqueness of India’s health sector, and the political realities of federalism.

It is in line with the implementation of the Centre’s flagship scheme Ayushman Bharat and other public healthcare programmes in the country.
It envisages a centralized health record for all citizens of the country in order to streamline the health information and facilitate effective management of the same.
The components include national health electronic registries, a coverage and claims platform, a federated personal health records framework, a national health analytics platform among others.
The proposed NHS is an approach to address the challenge and seeks to employ latest technology including Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence, a state of the art Policy Mark-up Language and create a unified health identity of citizens – as they navigate across services across levels of care, i.e. Primary, Secondary and Tertiary and also across Public and Private

What is utilization of Public health data Architecture?

The national repository of patient data will enable hospitals, healthcare units and doctors to access detailed treatment procedures.
Provide patient data from across the country to serve as precedent to understand and provide better healthcare
Minimize paperwork and documentation while transferring patients from one doctor/hospital to another, saving precious time
Help understand changes in patients’ symptoms and changes through access to their medical history
Prevent medical errors and incorrect diagnosis through access to medical history of patients
Understanding patterns and analysing trends of disease with access to grass root level data
Facilitating the creation of better healthcare policies and programs
Preparing more efficient plans for medical emergencies.like covid19.

What are the challenges/issues with public health data architecture?

Alignment of different survey is difficult: There have been previous attempts to align these surveys but they have failed as different advocates have different “demands “and push for inclusion of their set of questions.
Data Security and Privacy: One of the biggest concerns has been regarding data security and privacy of patients. The concerns were aggravated after an Assam minister and a senior official of the National Health Authority posted patient details on Twitter recently.
Multiple surveys also raise the problem of differing estimates, as is likely, due to sampling differences in the surveys. Example the issue of wide divergence in sex ratio at birth reported by the NFHS and the Sample Registration System (SRS).
Big Data in health care has its own features, such as heterogeneity, incompleteness, timeliness and longevity, privacy, and ownership. These features bring a series of challenges for data storage, mining, and sharing to promote health-related research.

Way Forward:

It is important to use data in public health delivery, and data can be used in many ways and for a variety of critical purposes. Data is crucial to demonstrate and evaluate the impact of an intervention, monitor progress towards a goal, determine barriers to care, and influence public policy.

Source: The Hindu

Mains Question:

Q. What is public health data architecture? Is Public Health Data Architecture important for India? What is the challenges to implement this? Illustrate.