ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account)

ABHA, the Ayushman Bharat Health Account, is a 14-digit health ID number that any person in India can create for free, and to which their health records from hospitals, labs, pharmacies and apps can be linked. The person can also choose an ABHA address, which is easier to remember, such as a name followed by @abdm. ABHA is part of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which the National Health Authority (NHA) runs. ABDM is part of India's digital public infrastructure.

Here is how ABHA works in general. A person creates an ABHA number on a phone, using Aadhaar or another ID such as a driving licence, with an OTP sent to their mobile number. When the person visits a hospital, lab or app that has joined ABDM, that place links the new record to the ABHA number. The record itself stays with the hospital or lab that created it. There is no single central database of everyone's records. When a doctor elsewhere wants to see the person's history, the doctor's system sends a request. The person sees the request on their phone and approves it, or declines it. The approval, called consent, says which records may be shared, with whom and for how long. Only then are the records sent, in a standard format, to that doctor's system.

Why does it matter? Today a patient's history is scattered across files, reports and phone photos. With ABHA, the history can follow the patient from one doctor to the next, and only when the patient approves.

Take, for example, a patient who consults a doctor on a telemedicine app. With the patient's consent, the doctor can see the blood test results from last month, even though a different lab did the test.

Consider a family that books a home sample collection. The lab links the result to the patient's ABHA number, so it appears in the patient's health record app.

Say a patient walks into a busy hospital's outpatient department. The patient scans a QR code at the counter, the hospital receives the details from ABHA, and the patient does not have to fill in a registration form.

How is ABHA different from Aadhaar? Aadhaar proves who a person is, for any purpose. ABHA is only for health, it is optional, and its number is different from the Aadhaar number. The consent step works much like an account aggregator, which shares a person's bank data with a lender only after the person approves. ABHA records also help hospitals send cashless claims through the National Health Claims Exchange.