Vision 2035: Public Health Surveillance in India

Vision 2035: Public Health Surveillance in India

Last updated: Dec, 2020

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.

  • It builds on programmes such as the Integrated Disease Monitoring Program's Integrated Health Information Network.
  • It aligns with the National Health Policy 2017 and the National Digital Health Blueprint. This facilitates the use of mobile and digital networks and point-of-care applications and diagnostics for data capture and research amalgamation.
  • It underlines the significance of capitalising on services such as the Clinical
  • Establishments Act to increase engagement in surveillance by the private sector.
  • It highlights the importance of a cohesive and organised effort by leading organisations, including the National Centre for Disease Control, the Medical Research Council of India, and others. Also, an independent Institute of Health Informatics will need to be created.

 

The four building blocks for Vision 2035 are as follows:

  • An interdependent decentralised structure between the Centre and States of governance architecture.
  • New unitized-based data collection and sharing systems for surveillance, comprehensive citizen-centered electronic health records (EHR) with a unique health identifier (UHID), combining current disease monitoring systems, and annual surveys data.
  • Extended use of modern data analytics, data technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
  • Advanced health informatics.

 

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.

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