Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan favoured the formation of a healthcare database in India. “We need to evolve towards a healthcare system that has something like an India stack on top where everybody plugs in... on the lines of what the banking and finance industry has done with Aadhaar,” he told a panel discussion on ‘Data, the New Currency’ organised as part of BioAsia.
To queries at the end of the discussion on how can life sciences harness the power of data to achieve better patient outcomes, he said it was preferable to have one common database and a regulator to manage it. “We need to make sure that any common database is as secure as possible,” he said, adding even the government should have an arms length relationship to the entity that manages this. That is why the emphasis on having a regulator, he said.
If fintech industry, he explained, was able to make things easier for customers with a range of solutions delivered through phone and through Universal Payment Interface (UPI), it was on account of the India stack that was created on the basis of Aadhaar. That has empowered the people, without the need for them to know the complexities of the system, he said, pointing out that there still was a long way to cover for healthcare database. “A lot of data is yet to be collected. Only 10% is getting captured electronically and that is in disparate database. Towards accelerating this process, a regulatory requirement is needed,” he said, pointing out that if Aadhaar was able to take off and touch the 1.3 billion people, it was because the government pushed for it.
