Digital health is no longer an optional layer over healthcare—it is fast becoming the core operating system of modern health systems. The coming decade will distinguish countries that merely digitise services from those that fundamentally redesign healthcare for the digital age. India’s journey offers one of the world’s most instructive case studies on how policy vision, political will, institutional continuity, and digital public infrastructure can converge to enable population-scale transformation.
Where India’s real journey began
India’s digital health journey did not start with technology—it started with political intent and policy clarity. The real inflection point came with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election manifesto in 2014, which explicitly articulated health as a national priority and emphasised systemic reform over fragmented interventions. This vision was translated into governance through the National Health Policy (NHP) and operationalised through the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) in 2018.
India demonstrated to the world a foundational principle often overlooked elsewhere: policies, rules, and regulations must precede programs. Rather than rushing into multiple pilots, half-hearted deployments, India invested in defining standards, legal frameworks, consent architectures, and regulatory pathways, creating a directional clarity before complex implementation across the states. Also, if ABDM was left to the states, it would have become a mess, so a national level institution with state-level bodies were created to ensure flexibility and scale as per local capacity and needs.
Institutions as the guarantors of continuity
Equally important was India’s recognition that institutions, not individuals are critical to sustain national missions. By creating a National Health Authority and embedding digital health within enduring public institutions and missions, India ensured continuity across political cycles, administrative changes, and leadership transitions. This institutional anchoring allowed ABDM and allied initiatives to evolve iteratively without losing direction, coherence, or public trust.
This approach offers a global template: ambitious national digital health programs succeed when they are insulated from short-term disruptions and guided by long-term institutional memory.
Achievements that have redefined global benchmarks
By any global standard, India’s achievements in digital health are unprecedented. Over 840 million ABHA IDs now form the world’s largest digital health identity framework. More than 430 million digital consultations delivered through eSanjeevani have proven that telemedicine can scale nationally within public systems and at near-zero cost to citizens.
India has also shown regulatory leadership. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) has approved Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) and Digital Therapeutics (DTx), placing India among a select group of countries with mature regulatory pathways for next-generation care modalities.
Together, these milestones firmly establish India as a global digital health leader—not only in ambition, but in execution, governance, and scale.
And yet—India is still warming up
Despite these accomplishments, the most important insight remains:
India has not yet started running.
What has been achieved so far is the construction of the runway, identity, consent, registries, platforms, and regulation. This phase has been about bringing digital health into existence as a national capability. The next phase will be about converting this capability into measurable health outcomes, workforce efficiency, cost containment, and system intelligence.
This is just the beginning.
The next phase: From infrastructure to impact
The coming years will determine whether India can fully leverage its digital health foundations. Success will depend on:
- Deep integration of ABDM into clinical workflows, insurance, public health surveillance, and medical education
- High-quality, consent-driven data flows under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023
- AI embedded into care pathways—not as pilots, but as routine clinical infrastructure
- Outcome-linked financing and procurement models
- State-led innovation, with progressive states acting as digital health laboratories
Lessons for the world
India has given the world a clear and replicable template: policy before platforms, governance before scale, and institutions before individuals. Digital health leadership is not built through technology alone, it is built through foresight, rules, trust, and continuity.
As nations across the Global North and South struggle with fragmentation, cost escalation, and workforce burnout, India’s experience demonstrates that digital transformation in healthcare is fundamentally a policy and governance challenge, enabled- but not driven- by technology.
The race for digital health leadership has begun. India has built the track, written the rules, and anchored the institutions. Now it must run, and the world is watching.