In News:

India hosted the 2nd Regional Open Digital Health Summit (RODHS) 2025 in New Delhi, bringing together South-East Asian countries to accelerate Universal Health Coverage (UHC) through Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), open standards, and interoperable digital health systems.

About RODHS 2025

• Nature: A regional, multi-stakeholder platform to advance open, interoperable, people-centred digital health systems across the WHO South-East Asia Region.
• Organisers:
  • National e-Governance Division (NeGD), Ministry of Electronics & IT
  • National Health Authority (NHA)
  • World Health Organization South-East Asia Regional Office (WHO-SEARO)
  • UNICEF
• Participation: India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nepal, Maldives and other South-East Asian countries.
• Context: Builds on momentum from the inaugural summit (Nairobi) and aligns digital health with SDGs and health security.

Key Objectives

• Integrate DPI and open standards into national health systems to support UHC.
• Promote interoperability, trust, skills, and community-centric design.
• Develop country-specific roadmaps for scalable digital health implementation.
• Move from pilot projects to population-scale systems.

India’s DPI Showcase

India highlighted its DPI stack and health platforms as scalable digital public goods:

• Aadhaar (digital identity)
• UPI (digital payments)
• CoWIN (vaccination platform)
• Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) (national digital health ecosystem)

These were presented as models for secure data exchange, federated architecture, and nationwide scale.

Major Themes & Discussions

• Open Standards & Interoperability:
  • Adoption of WHO SMART Guidelines (Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive, Requirements-based, Testable).
  • FHIR as the global standard for health data exchange; emphasis on governance, workforce capacity and sustained investment.
• Foundational DPI for Health:Role of digital identity, payments, registries and data exchange layers in resilient health ecosystems.
• AI & Generative AI in Health:Use-cases in diagnostics, clinical documentation, multilingual engagement and data integration-enabled by interoperable data.
• Equity & Trust:UNICEF and WHO stressed privacy, child-centric design, health-worker enablement, and community adoption.

Outcomes & Significance

• Reinforced regional cooperation for interoperable digital health.
• Positioned DPI + open standards as core enablers of UHC and health system resilience.
• Encouraged joint governance between health and IT ministries to avoid silos.
• Emphasised that success should be measured by health outcomes, not just digital adoption.