Digital Public Infrastructure for Health (DPI-H) is a novel and evolving paradigm for the digital transformation of health systems. It refers to a country’s digital health infrastructure- a set of reusable digital building blocks, including health IDs, shared trusted health registries and open health networks, that enable the creation of inclusive, scaled and user-driven applications in a health system.
The DPI-H approach is gaining traction across countries such as India, Brazil and Kenya, primarily to substitute traditionally siloed and fragmented digital health solutions with integrated and interoperable systems.
As of January 7, 2026, 846.4 million health IDs (ABHA) have been created in India, 0.7 million health professionals registered on the Health Professional Registry (HPR) and 0.4 million health facilities have been onboarded on the Health Facility Registry (HFR). In terms of usage of ABDM, 815 million health records have been linked to ABHA, 178 million scan and share tokens have been issued and 0.2 million facilities are using ABDM enabled software.
(The views expressed are personal)
This paper can be accessed here.
This paper is authored by Shailly Gupta and Mehak Aggarwal, ICRIER, New Delhi.
