More and more hospitals in India are being asked to connect their systems to the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM). It's tempting to treat this as an IT task: get the sandbox credentials, call the APIs, done. In our experience, the APIs are the easy part. The harder work is deciding how ABDM fits into the way your hospital already runs.
What 'ABDM integration' actually covers
For most hospitals, there are three pieces. The first is creating and verifying ABHA numbers (the patient's Ayushman Bharat Health Account) at registration. The second is acting as a Health Information Provider: linking a patient's visits and records to their ABHA, and sharing them with the patient's consent. The third is acting as a Health Information User: requesting a patient's records from other providers, again with consent. Your facility and your clinicians also need to be listed in the national facility and professional registries.
Five things to settle first
Start at the registration desk. Where in the registration flow does ABHA get captured, and what happens when a patient doesn't have one or can't verify it? If this isn't planned, it slows down the queue and staff quietly skip it.
Decide what a 'care context' means in your system. Is it an outpatient visit, an admission, a lab order? This mapping decides which records a patient sees together, and it's much easier to get right before go-live than after.
Look honestly at your data. ABDM records are exchanged as FHIR resources based on national profiles. If your discharge summaries or prescriptions are mostly free text, you'll need to decide which record types to start with and how to structure them.
Design for consent. Patients approve each request for their records, and that approval is limited in time and scope. Your system has to respect those limits, and with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act now in force, your consent handling needs to stand up to scrutiny on its own terms.
Plan the route to production. Moving from the sandbox to live access involves functional testing and a security assessment. Build that into the timeline from the start, and check the National Health Authority's current requirements, because they get updated.
Where we come in
We help hospitals and HIS vendors work through these decisions before development starts, and then deliver the integration itself, from mapping and FHIR resource design to testing and go-live support. If you're planning an ABDM connection, we're happy to talk through where you are.