A National Healthcare Data Network for India

The Indian healthcare sector is going through a period of significant transformation; moving from paper-based systems to electronic solutions. In order to be accessible to the current population and be able to cope with societal and technological advances, the new system has to be guided by present well-established medical practices in India and be designed and engineered to adapt and interoperate with other systems, both local and international. At the core of such a system has to be a well-designed data network. In this paper, we present our work on building such a network. We also highlight our design imperatives, which include the ability to address the issues of interoperability, scalability, privacy, security and extensibility in a very large data system.