ABHA and the Ayushman Bharat Health Mission
The Government of India initiative that gives every citizen a digital health account. It is the reason a lifetime record is possible, and the reason our programmes start with registration rather than with screening.
An identity, not a record
An ABHA number identifies a person within the national digital health ecosystem. It does not itself contain clinical information. Its value is that records created in different places, by different providers, at different times, can be linked to the same person.
This is the single largest thing that has changed in Indian health data in a generation, and it is why the model we run — screen, code, attach, carry — works now and would not have worked ten years ago.
Generate or link — never both
Four operations
Generate
Where a beneficiary has no ABHA number, we generate one with consent at registration.
Link
Where one exists, we link rather than duplicate. Duplicate identities are the failure mode that destroys longitudinal value.
Attach
Screening findings, laboratory results and consultation notes are written against the identity, coded.
Hand over
The person leaves with the identity and the means to use it — the card.
Stated honestly
An identity with no content is an empty file
Registration figures are in the hundreds of millions. Records of clinical substance behind those numbers are far fewer. Our work is on the second number, not the first.
Linkage is not the same as access
A linked record still requires a consent flow to be read by another provider, and that flow has to be usable by somebody standing at a counter.
Coverage is uneven
Penetration varies sharply by district, which is why the first question in any programme scoping is what proportion of the population already has a number.
Register a population.
School, workforce or community.