India is focusing on its health system reforms to ensure that the Public Health Surveillance systems are made citizen-centric and contributed to the overall socio-economic development of the country. In line with this, on December 14, 2020, 'Vision 2035: Public Health Surveillance in India' was published by NITI Aayog, which recommended improving India's Public Health Surveillance (PHS) by introducing a surveillance information system.
India's Surveillance of Public Health by 2035 builds on prospects which includes the Ayushman Bharat scheme that develops community-level health and wellness centres to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and control of non-communicable diseases and ensure government hospitalisation payments to minimise the cost for individuals and families at the bottom of the pyramid.
The four building blocks for Vision 2035 are as follows:
Going forward, India would see a public health surveillance focused on individual EHRs that, with the help of UHID, collect and amalgamate the health-care related information of individuals. This mechanism will be used for any visit to the clinic, laboratory, or pharmacy and for vertical monitoring programmes for disease. Routine surveys are designed as additional complementary tools to reassess disease/risk factor occurrence and prevalence, to regularly modify and refine standard case descriptions, outbreak thresholds, and refine the levels and indicators of response. A Platform for Surveillance Information can store, review, and auto-generate appropriate action reports. This remains a repository for further study and studies that will complement the surveillance information available in the system.
Mr. Rajiv Kumar, vice chairman of NITI Aayog, stated that India has made significant progress in the prevention, control and elimination of major communicable diseases. It is time to improve non-communicable disease surveillance and to replace conventional data entry surveillance systems with recent advances in digital health and technology, in line with the National Digital Health Mission.