Engaging with the Healthcare Developer Ecosystem in India
Shruti Gadgil (Clinical Specialist), Arun Samudrala (Software Engineer), Richa Tiwari (Program Manager) — Google Health
Like many countries, India faces challenges in its healthcare system due to fragmentation and limited digital adoption. This makes care coordination across healthcare providers challenging. Legacy digital systems have created data silos and they lack standardization. To address this, the Indian government has made considerable efforts in recent years towards building an integrated digital health infrastructure in the country. Ayushmann Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is an initiative by the National Health Authority (NHA) to develop guidance and policy for healthcare data standardization and interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem. Concurrently, national agencies have been mandated to accelerate and promote adoption of EHR and FHIR standards in India, making interoperability seamless for holistic patient care. In this context, Google’s Open Health Stack (OHS) is well-aligned to support the Indian ecosystem in its healthcare digitization efforts. OHS provides building blocks to develop next-generation digital health tools and makes it easier to adopt the HL7 FHIR standard.
Recently, Google Health conducted a first-of-its-kind OHS Developer Workshop in India. The workshop was held during the annual Global Digital Health Summit & Expo (GDHS) in Mumbai in September, 2023. The summit brought together innovators, developers, and experts from the healthcare and technology sectors in India. With the opportunity to engage with the local developer ecosystem, our OHS workshop aimed to build awareness amongst participants on key concepts, such as FHIR basics and the OHS tools required to build next-gen digital health apps. The workshop also included hands-on tutorials on building mobile apps using the Android FHIR SDK and how to use FHIR analytics. The session was attended by about 50 developers from both private start-ups and public healthcare sectors, including members from the ABDM team.
Participant feedback on the workshop included an appreciation on the “step by step process of explanation and [learning] the importance of FHIR and how it makes use of OHS”.
We are planning future deep dives and sessions to build awareness and capability for OHS in India. If you’re interested in learning more about Open Health Stack or in hosting your own developer workshop, please send us an e-mail at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.
