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Announcing Healthathon 2020

  1. Context
  2. Format
  3. Ideas & Themes
  4. Speakers & Judges
  5. Event Calendar
  6. Sponsors & Partners
  7. Prizes
  8. Registration Details

Context

Those of you who have been following this blog would know that as we speak, India is rolling out a piece of public digital infrastructure known as the National Health Stack (NHS). This project, which is being put into place to futurize the nation’s health technology ecosystem, has exciting and important ramifications for the entire country.

The ground reality in India is that the doctor:patient ratio in the country is low and inequitably distributed. Moreover, the digitization of health data is minimal and the availability of care facilities is sporadic. Taken together, these factors contribute to a relatively subpar standard of public health, which in turn affects happiness and productivity. In a country like India in which each percentage point of productivity and growth corresponds to millions of people moving out of poverty, it is doubly important to bring up the standard of public health as quickly as possible.

One of the components of the NHS which can do this is the Personal Health Records (PHR) system. This system establishes a standardized interface for storing, managing, and sharing medical data, all with user consent. If users can assert greater control over their own health data, they can derive more utility, convenience, and value. This might take expression through easier access to teleconsultations, or perhaps through a better consumer interface to canvas second opinions about some test reports or medical images. The PHR could also allow for individuals to securely and voluntarily contribute their anonymized healthcare data towards data sets used to map and manage public health trends over time.

The possibilities for the PHR system are many, but it will require a collaboration between the public sector, private sector, and medical community to make the most of this technology. For this reason, we are excited to announce the launch of the Healthathon 2020.

This four-week long virtual conference aims to bring together different stakeholders to work on solutions and products stemming from the PHR system. One key group of stakeholders is the public sector bodies like the NHA and MoHFW,  without whose support this initiative can never reach all of the 1.3 billion Indians. The second group is the private sector players such as health tech companies, entrepreneurs, private equity investors, and technology providers – without their creativity, capital, and execution capacity, it will be hard to make any project sustainable or scalable. The last stakeholder group is the medical community of doctors, hospitals, labs, and others; it is clear that without the buy-in and support of this group, no technology intervention can pinpoint or solve the most pressing problems. 

Format

The Healthathon 2020 will feature two competitions: the Hackathon and Ideathon. The Ideathon is a 2-week long event aimed at students, medical practitioners, and non-technical parties. During this event, teams will compete to come up with the best business plans and product ideas around the PHR system. 

In contrast to the Ideathon, the Hackathon is a 4-week long event aimed at startups, corporates, entrepreneurs, developers, and health tech enthusiasts. As part of the Hackathon, teams of developers will work on building projects on top of the new PHR APIs provided by our sandbox providers. 

Participants in both competitions will receive the mentorship, guidance, and resources they need to put out the best possible submissions. Panels of judges will then award prize money to the best teams from each competition. 

In addition to the Ideathon and Hackathon, there will also be a slew of masterclasses, panel discussions, and other events. These sessions are intended to generate engagement, awareness, and innovation around the PHR system, and they will all be recorded and open to the public. 

We hope that the event will draw in participants from different fields and backgrounds, united in the purpose of leveraging technology to make India healthier, more inclusive, and more efficient.

Hackathon & Ideathon Themes

Some of the themes that teams could choose to work on for the two competitions could include:

End Use Apps:
  • Apps that can read healthcare reports and provide some additional context or insight using AI
  • Platforms to help create real time monitoring and alerts for doctors using their patient’s wearable device data
  • Doctor-facing apps that help unify and analyze patient’s health records across different data sources
  • Health lockers for secure and convenient long term storage of health data
  • Matching systems that pair patients with the right kind of care provider given a medical report or treatment history
  • Anonymised health trends/dashboards for epidemiological studies
  • Preventive care applications that promote healthy living by tracking health markers and gamifying healthy living
  • Applications that provide and track continued & personalized care plans for chronic disease patients (eg. cancer care) 
  • New insurance products, possibly featuring fraud prevention and auto-adjudication based on PHR 
Consent Management:
  • Apps that help the user discover, link, and share access to their medical data
  • Building assisted and accessible consent flows for low-literacy or non-smartphone users
  • Systems to delegate patient consent in case of emergencies or other extenuating circumstances
  • Consent lifecycle management systems ie. generating, storing, revoking, and  safeguarding consent
  • Easy and informed consent experiences eg. “scan to share data”, “understand what you are consenting to”
Middleware and Utilities:
  • Secure data storage and management facilities
  • Tools to help medical institutions adopt and use the PHR system
  • AI utilities to decipher and parse medical data
  • Developer tools to simplify and abstract the workflows for PHR development 

Speakers and Judges

Here is a list of some of the speakers and judges for the event:

  • Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Executive Chairperson, Biocon
  • Dr. C. S. Pramesh, Convener, National Cancer Grid
  • Sanjeev Srinivasan, CEO, Bharti Axa General Insurance
  • Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, Group CIO, Apollo Hospitals
  • Nachiket Mor, Commissioner, Lancet Committee on Reimagining Healthcare in India
  • Shashank ND, CEO, Practo
  • Gaurav Agarwal, CTO, 1mg
  • Dr. Ajay Bakshi, CEO, Buddhimed
  • Dr. Aditya Daftary, Radiologist, Innovision
  • Kiran Anandampillai, Technology Advisor, NHA
  • Dharmil Sheth, CEO, PharmEasy
  • Pankaj Sahni, CEO, Medanta
  • Veneeth Purushotaman, Group CIO, Aster Healthcare
  • Yashish Dahiya, CEO, Policybazaar
  • Abhimanyu Bhosale, CEO, LiveHealth
  • Prabhdeep Singh, CEO, Stanplus
  • Rajat Agarwal, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India
  • Tarun Davda, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India

Prospective Talks and Masterclasses

  • “An overview of the NHS architecture and objectives”
  • “A deepdive into the PHR APIs”
  • “Medical imaging data: Changing the Status Quo”
  • “Using delegated consent to bolster efficacy in emergency care”
  • “Technology challenges and opportunities for hospitals and labs”
  • “Health Tech in India: successes and areas of improvement”

Sponsors and Partners

Principal Sponsors
  • Matrix India Partners
  • Swasth Alliance
Knowledge Partners
  • CHIME India
  • HIMSS India Chapter
Sandbox Providers
  • National Health Authority
  • LiveHealth
Organization Partner:
  • Devfolio

Cash Prizes

Six teams in the hackathon will be eligible to win prizes of Rs. 50,000 each

Five teams in the ideathon will be eligible to win prizes of Rs. 20,000 each.

Dates, Registration, and Outreach

Registration Link (for both events): https://healthathon.devfolio.co

Registrations Close (for both events) : 22nd October, 2020

Opening Ceremony: 24th October, 2020

Ideathon submissions: November 6th, 2020

Hackathon submissions: November 19th, 2020

Closing Ceremony: 22nd November

Outreach: [email protected] (Email subject: “Healthathon”)

Blog Post Image Source: SelectInsureGroup.com

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NHS Open House on Open Health Services Network

It has been a while since our last blog on this topic. After a break of two weeks, we recently completed the fifth Open House Discussion on the National Health Stack (NHS).

In this session, held from 11:30 am-12 pm on 31st July 2020, our volunteers Sharad Sharma, Siddharth Shetty, and Dr Pramod Varma talked about the Open Health Services Network (OHSN – pronounced ‘ocean’).

As a refresher, the OHSN is the interface which governs the relationship between various market players in the healthcare ecosystem such as tele consult providers, pharmacies, or diagnostic centres on one side, and government or private apps and platforms on the other side. 

It is important for these relationships to be properly streamlined and mapped out for two reasons:

  • To establish baseline standards of care
  • And to provide auditable and transparent processes governing the transfer of data and payments

If these two objectives are met, the healthcare ecosystem as a whole can be made more accessible, secure, and efficient for both users and service providers.

This session focused upon the specific relationship between teleconsultation service providers and end-user apps (EUAs) offering teleconsultation services. 

From the perspective of OSHN, tele consultations involve three players:

  • the EUA (an end-user app selected by the user)
  • an OHSN gateway (a matching agent of sorts)
  • a telehealth service provider (‘provider’)

The process follows these steps:

  1. The user signs up on an EUA
  2. The user searches for doctors/consultations
  3. The OHSN gateway forwards this customer intent to the network of providers
  4. Providers reply with tele consultation offerings
  5. The user selects the preferred offering on the EUA interface
  6. The user then confirms the session with the provider 
  7. The user conducts a pre-consult with the provider through their EUA
  8. The consultation takes place over a medium offered by the EUA (could be SMS, chat, video, audio, VoIP)
  9. The consultation then gets completed and the doctor sends over their consultation notes and prescription from the provider app to the EUA.

All these steps are standardized so that any EUA can talk to any provider app to facilitate this flow. The API specifications for this are laid out at https://bit.ly/2X6skVV (Version 0.5). These APIs were developed in association with beckn.org, an open protocol for distributed commerce. 

To learn more about this flow and to hear Sharad, Sid, and Pramod talk about the OHSN principles and APIs, you can visit this link: https://youtu.be/kI7aQw3BUTc

In order to ask some questions which can be answered during the next Open House Session, you can visit https://bit.ly/NHS-QAForm

The next seventh Open House Discussion about the National Health Stack takes place tomorrow, Saturday, August 1st, at 11:30 am. The topic for discussion is the PHR (Personal Health Records) economic model. Interested parties can watched the recording here: https://youtu.be/Y5MIEB1TPw4

The following Open House Discussion will focus upon the OHSN technology architecture, and will take place on Saturday, 15th August at 11:30 am. The link for this session is the same as above – https://bit.ly/NHS-OHD

We hope this summary was useful and we look forward to engaging with you during the next Open House Discussion!

PS. Any parties interested in implementing or contributing to these APIs can reach out to [email protected] with the subject line “Interested in technical contributions for NHS”

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NHS Open House Discussion #4: Doctor Registry, Enrollment APIs And PHR

On 13th June, iSPIRT hosted the fourth open house discussion on the National Health Stack (NHS). For anybody unfamiliar with the NHS, here are some introductory blog posts and videos.

In the session, our volunteer Vikram Srinivasan deep dived into the Enrollment APIs of the electronic doctor registry. These APIs are called when a new doctor is being added to the registry, or when a doctor’s information is being uploaded. 

Vikram also spoke about the attestation APIs, which come into play when an attesting institution (such as a state medical council, medical college, or hospital) confirms some data about a doctor. This is crucially important for building trust in the registry and preventing the proliferation of false profiles. With the release of these enrolment and attestation APIs, all the APIs pertaining to the electronic doctor registry are now available here.

After Vikram’s presentation, he and our other volunteer Siddharth Shetty answered some technical questions submitted by the community. Here are some of the questions they fielded:

  • Doctors have multiple identities (from different medical councils), how are these unique IDs handled by the electronic registry?
  • Can anybody access the doctor information in the registry, including phone numbers and photographs of doctors?
  • Who can healthcare companies partner with in the Health Stack Ecosystem?
  • How does the federated network architecture of the PHR system deal with downtimes, incorrect data, and other failure? Is this architecture scalable for a system with 1000s of participants?

As always, these were great questions. You can watch Sid and Vikram answer these questions and walk through their presentations below. Please keep the questions coming by sending them in through this form: https://bit.ly/NHS-QAForm.

If you would like to get involved with Health Stack, we encourage you to watch the recordings of the previous Health Stack open house discussions before reaching out.

Furthermore, if you are interested in the Health Stack and wish to build on top of it or contribute to the working groups being formed, you should reach out to [email protected]

Please note: The fifth open house on PHR Implementation was previously planned for 27th June. This has been postponed to 11:30 am on 4th July due to unavoidable circumstances.

To confirm your participation, continue to register on this form.

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NHS Open House on PHR & Doctor Registry #3: Summary And Next Steps

On 6th June, we marked the third open house discussion of the National Health Stack (NHS). At the beginning of the session, iSPIRT volunteer Sharad Sharma offered a brief recap of the NHS and painted a roadmap for future developments in this initiative (including timelines, agendas, and future open house sessions). Sharad also discussed the content of the most recent open house session, in which Kiran Anandampillai explained the concept of the electronic registry system. After reiterating the vision for the NHS and the registry system, Sharad passed the floor to iSPIRT volunteer Vikram Srinivasan to dive into the registry APIs.

As a refresher, the electronic registry system is a mechanism for managing master data about different entities in the healthcare ecosystem. In today’ session, Vikram focused on the doctor registry. As the name suggests, the doctor registry will contain information about the doctors licensed to practice in India.

The doctor registry has the following design principles:

  1. Self maintainability: Doctors should be able to enrol themselves and update their own data
  1. Non-repudiable: The data in the registry should be digitally signed by a relevant attester (such as a State Medical Council) so that it can independently be verified by anybody
  1. Layered access: There should be a clear demarcation between public and private data in the registry, with only consent-based access to private data (eg. a doctor’s name and registration status should be public, but mobile number and photo should be private)
  1. Extensible schema: The data in the public registries should be as minimal as possible, allowing private players to build their own extensions around the core schema
  1. Open APIs: The data in the registries should be available via open APIs 
  1. Incentive aligned: The registry must enable convenient use cases so that doctors have an incentive to keep it up to date (eg. doctors can use their registry profile to electronically sign prescriptions, insurance claims etc. or doctors can use their registry profile to streamline and digitize the process of renewing their medical licenses)

After discussing the design principles behind the registry, Vikram dived straight into the details of the doctor registry APIs, which can be broken into the following categories:

  1. Enrollment APIs: These APIs allow doctors to enrol in the registry and update their data
  1. Consented APIs: These APIs allow a doctor to authenticate themselves, share their data/profile, and electronically sign documents
  1. Search APIs: These APIs are used to access the registry to query a doctor’s public data or search for any other publicly available information 

After covering these topics at a high level, Vikram released the API specifications for the Consented APIs and the Search APIs. The Swagger documentation for the same can be found here. The enrollment APIs will be released during next week’s open house session.

Upon completing his walkthrough of the doctor registry APIs, Vikram handed the floor over to our volunteer Siddharth Shetty. In the beginning of his segment, Siddharth answered the community’s technical questions around the NHS. Here are the questions he answered:

  • Is it mandatory to use the Open Source Project Eka codebase that has been published for the Consent Manager, API Bridge, and Gateway? 
  • In case of the Schema Standardization, during the 1st schema-less phase, are HIPs allowed to share data formats like JPEG, PDFs etc? 
  • Can the consent manager give the health locker (as an HIU) a standing consent to keep pulling the user’s information from various HIPs on an ongoing basis i.e. bypass the consent manager for future requests
  • Can the API bridges be configured such that instead of just sending the links to the information based on a request from an HIU (health locker in this case), the information can be sent such that it can be copied into the health locker?
  • Will the consent artifacts be encrypted between parties using any asymmetric key mechanism which will be valid between the services?
  • Is there any defined/recommended timeout for the data transmission from HIU – Bridge – CM- HIP and then HIU – HIP?

These were all great questions, and hopefully Siddharth’s answers helped clarify any doubts. If anybody wishes to ask any other questions around the NHS, please send them in to [email protected] with the subject line “NHS Questions”. Siddharth will continue answering the community’s technical questions during next week’s session (business-related questions will be answered in subsequent sessions).

To close off the open house discussion, Siddharth laid out the different working groups in the NHS ecosystem. Since the NHS is an open, public ecosystem, it is crucial for industry players and interested citizens to contribute to its development and pitch in with their feedback, knowledge, and engagement. Here are the working groups that are currently being formed:

  1. Technical Architecture Group: Responsible for working on open technical problems such as circuit breaker flows and time-out mechanisms. Also responsible for extensions and changes to the tech architecture
  1. Data Dictionary Group: This working group deals with moving away from the current schema-less architecture towards a standardized data vocabulary (leveraging existing medical schema projects and also coming up with new ideas relevant to the Indian context)
  1. Pilot Group: This group is comprised of people who have already started building on the NHS components (or would like to start building on the components). 
  1. Ecosystem Incentives Group: This group is looking at the incentive structures that power the NHS ecosystem (monetary and otherwise)

Any readers who are interested in learning more or joining these working groups are invited to reach out to [email protected]. A complete recording of the 6th June’s open house discussion can be found below

During next week’s session, we will be covering the Personal Health Records system (PHR), particularly as it relates to hospitals, and we will also be diving deeper into the Doctor Registry Enrollment APIs.

Readers are advised that next week’s NHS open house discussion will take place from 11:30 am – 12:30 pm on Saturday, June 13th.

The registration form for next week’s session can be found here. 

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iSPIRT NHS Open House Session #2: PHR and Doctor Registry

iSPIRT hosted the second open house session on the National Health Stack (NHS). 

In this session, our health stack volunteers dived deeper into the Personal Health Record (PHR) system and also covered the concept of the Electronic Doctor Registry.

In the first part of the session, our volunteer Siddharth Shetty answered technical questions pertaining to the PHR system. These questions, which were all submitted by the community, covered topics ranging from blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs to assisted consent flow for low tech-savvy users. A link to a recording of the session can be found at the end of this post.

In the second half of the session, our volunteer Kiran Anandampillai explained the concept of the doctor registry. The electronic registry system is a mechanism for managing master data about different entities in the healthcare ecosystem. Although some of these entities do appear in existing databases, these legacy systems are often incomplete, outdated, and seldom accessible via APIs. In contrast, the registries in the NHS are intended to capture trusted, non-repudiable data and enable self-maintainability. These registries will also have open APIs and will allow for secure authentication and data sharing. 

In the context of doctors, the electronic doctor registry can be used to:

  • Prove their identity and credentials as doctors
  • Electronically sign documents such as prescriptions, insurance claims, operating theatre notes, and more
  • Streamline workflows such as joining or telehealth application or registering for CME points (Continuing Medical Education points necessary for renewing a doctor’s license)

A recording of the entire session, including a breakdown of the design principles, APIs, and timelines behind the doctor registry, can be found below.

Inquisitive readers are also encouraged to submit their technical questions around the NHS to [email protected].

We will be answering those questions at the start of next week’s open house session, which will begin at 11:30 am on Saturday, 6th June. An invite to that session will be sent out to all participants who sign up at this link: https:// www.bit.ly/NHS-OHD

Although these sessions have so far been focusing on technical features of the NHS, the business and design aspects are also crucially important and will be covered in short order.

The blog post is authored by our volunteer Aaryaman Vir and he can be reached at [email protected].