Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission

The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is India’s digital public infrastructure for connecting patients, healthcare professionals, facilities and digital health services. Its core is a federated, consent-based architecture in which standardized health records remain with their originating entities and can be securely exchanged across interoperable systems.

Foundational identity and registries

These building blocks establish trusted identities and searchable directories across the digital health ecosystem.

• The ABHA number is a voluntary, unique 14-digit health identifier that helps link an individual’s records across participating systems; it does not itself contain the health records.
• The Healthcare Professionals Registry provides verified professional profiles for practitioners participating in digital health services.
• The Health Facility Registry provides a national repository of public and private health facilities such as hospitals, clinics, laboratories and pharmacies.

Federated health information exchange

ABDM does not require every clinical record to be placed in one central database. Records are retained by healthcare providers and exchanged through the Health Information Exchange and Consent Manager framework only after the individual authorizes access.

• Consent specifies the requesting entity, purpose, type of information and permitted period of access.
• Common digital health standards and open APIs allow different hospital, laboratory, pharmacy and application systems to communicate.
• The architecture follows privacy and security by design, with authentication, auditability and user control over sharing.

Open networks for healthcare services

Above the identity, registry and exchange layers, ABDM supports networks that allow different applications to participate without being tied to one platform.

• The Unified Health Interface enables interoperable discovery and delivery of services such as appointments and teleconsultations.
• The National Health Claims Exchange supports standardized digital exchange of claims information among healthcare providers and payers.
• This architecture can make consented, standardized data usable for public health analysis and AI applications, but ABDM itself is enabling infrastructure rather than an AI system.