India's Digital Public Health Stack: Can It Redefine Healthcare Delivery for the Next Billion?
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India has now issued more digital health identities than the entire population of Europe and it did this in under five years. By 2026, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) had crossed 90 crore (900 million) Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts (ABHA), with more than 100 crore health records already linked to them. No other country has tried to build a health data system at this scale, for the diverse population, using an open, federated model instead of one centralised database. ABDM extends the same Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) approach that gave India Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, and CoWIN, and applies it to one of the hardest sectors to digitise healthcare.
Most countries digitise healthcare, hospital by hospital. India has instead built an open layer that lets patients, providers, labs, pharmacies, insurers, and health-tech companies exchange data on shared rails, that distinction matters more than it sounds. Hospital-by-hospital digitisation tends to produce data islands that never quite connect to each other, which is the story of most electronic health record rollouts globally. A shared exchange layer that any provider can plug into avoids that problem from day one. For a country of over 1.4 billion people with wildly uneven levels of hospital infrastructure, that kind of interoperability isn't a nice-to-have. It's close to the only realistic path to universal digital health access.
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