When we look at the infrastructure of a modern nation, we think of highways, power grids, water pipelines, and fibre optic cables: the invisible systems that keep everything moving. But there’s another infrastructure quietly shaping the future of economies: Health data. In many western countries, health data is treated as a strategic national capital. It fuels research, informs policy, drives insurance innovation, and enables predictive, preventive health care at scale.
In India, however, health data often lives in fragments: scattered across hospitals, diagnostic labs, insurance portals, and sometimes even folded into paper files at home. We revisit it only during medical emergencies.
The global health care narrative is shifting from treating disease to predicting and preventing it. If we want to participate in the future of health care, we must recognise a simple truth: Health data is no longer just medical information; it is a national strategic infrastructure.
Countries such as the UK and the US treat health data as a strategic national asset, empowering entire research and policy ecosystems. The UK Biobank serves as a repository for genetic and lifestyle data, encompassing over half a million individuals. This dataset has enabled global breakthroughs in dementia, cancer, and chronic disease research.
The UK’s Federated Data Platform integrates millions of health records, allowing the government to forecast disease outbreaks and plan hospital capacity with remarkable precision.
In the US, the FDA’s Sentinel System monitors drug safety nationwide in near real time. What sets these systems apart is not just superior technology; it is interoperability. In the West, data-sharing is embedded in policy, not added as a software feature.
Through global standards such as APIs and FHIR, a patient’s data moves seamlessly from a general physician to a specialist, often before the patient arrives. This connectivity reduces diagnostic errors, eliminates duplicate testing, and enables AI models to flag cardiac risks weeks before they escalate into emergencies. Data is not archived; it is activated.
India succeeded in digitising health care but failed to integrate it. Flagship platforms such as CoWIN and ABDM demonstrate technological capability at a national scale. Telemedicine adoption has also grown significantly. Yet outside these systems, patient data remains siloed. Lab reports are stored within diagnostic networks; prescriptions remain within hospital systems, and insurance history sits with payers. These systems rarely communicate with one another.
What is often described as digital health in India today largely centers on documentation–PDFs, billing systems, and standalone databases. These have improved efficiency and access and mark meaningful progress. The next step, however, is integration.
The challenge is not technological adoption but connecting fragmented systems. The opportunity now is to link these digital assets into a unified intelligence layer that enables longitudinal insight and preventive care.
Non‑communicable diseases account for nearly 65% of deaths in India, with conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease increasingly affecting the working population. These illnesses develop gradually, with early indicators visible in routine health parameters: rising glucose levels, borderline cholesterol, and incremental weight gain. In a fragmented system, these indicators remain isolated across laboratories, hospitals, and insurers. Without longitudinal analysis, risk is neither identified nor managed early.
The consequence is delayed diagnosis, higher treatment costs, increased insurance claims, and measurable productivity loss for employers. Prevention, therefore, is not a rhetorical aspiration. It is a financially rational strategy, one that depends on integrated, continuous health data.
To transform health data into a national asset, three foundational shifts are essential.
- First, a unified and interoperable health data layer
Health records generated by hospitals, laboratories, insurers, and digital platforms must be able to speak to each other. A test conducted in one city should not disappear when a patient consults a doctor in another. Interoperability ensures continuity of care and creates a complete health history over time. - Second, consent-driven, citizen-owned records
Individuals should have the control to access their data, securely share it, and utilise it across various providers. - Third, a preventive, digital-first health stack powered by analytics
Once data is connected and accessible, it must be analysed. Patterns across years, not just visits, can identify rising risks, trigger early interventions, and guide employers and insurers toward proactive care. Beyond population-level insights, connected data can enable hyper-personalisation: tailoring interventions, screening schedules, nutrition guidance, and lifestyle recommendations to improve an individual’s long-term health trajectory.
This marks a shift from asking, “How do we treat this illness?” to asking, “How can we identify and reduce this risk early?” India already possesses the scale, digital infrastructure, and technological capability to build this system. The foundation exists. The moment now calls for coordinated action to turn digital progress into national health intelligence.
This article is authored by Kiran Kalakuntla, CEO and co-founder, ekincare.
