ACADEMY OF DIGITAL DOCTORS JOURNAL 14
Q : What is it that led to you leaving Infosys to take up a government position at UIDAI and how do you envision the AADHAAR being used in different areas in future ? It was an opportunity to lead a different kind of project with the purpose being to give every Indian one unique ID . So we decided to use biometrics and worked with a government and design team to develop a platform with Application Programming Interfaces ( APIs ) so that people could embed their IDs to all kinds of devices and apps .
The first use for the AAD- HAAR would be for financial data as the government primarily wanted to use it to make provision of subsidies more efficient .
But we always thought of this as a platform that would support many things , including electronic healthcare accounts and this is something we hope will happen in the coming years .
Q : What are the next big things you see being used for the entire system ?
Since it ’ s a platform it all depends on the innovation of people so we cannot anticipate what will happen . But telecommunication is a big thing . Soon , with your AAD- HAAR card you will be able able to get a sim card within 15 minutes .
Next would be healthcare and using AADHAAR as a foundation for healthcare records is going to be big .
After this we expect the focus to be on skills and trust . Having a verifiable identity helps with trust and you can also have a skills record . However , I can ’ t say what we may see 10 years down the road . Q : Interoperability of health records is a topic of discussion across the world today with some western economies like US struggling because their market is fragmented . How do you think India is placed for interoperability and leverage AADHAAR to build such a system ?
AADHAAR can be the key to building the next-generation health record system .
AADHAAR can actually be the key to building the next-generation electronic health record system because it provides authentication .
All records of an individual ’ s consultations , tests , and prescriptions will be securely stored here and only you have the ability to share your information with anyone else . Having all the information in one place also provides for a longitudinal view of one ’ s health record .
This system doesn ’ t exist elsewhere and therefore we can make it completely interoperable . In the West , the challenge is that your information is all scattered . But because we don ’ t have such a legacy system in place , we could be the game-changers .
Q : Considering India ’ s healthcare access challenge , telemedicine has been pitted as the answer to it . What are your views on this ?
Think of telemedicine as expertise on the cloud . The doctor and patient may be in separate places but having all the patient information on the cloud solves one problem . A person may not be a doctor , but can still capture the relevant data using new medical devices .
Once you have expertise on the cloud , you can apply it to a larger set of people and solve the spatial problem of expertise . In India , doctors are very urban-centric whereas the rural areas have very few doctors available . With