Introduction

The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is India's national digital health ecosystem, run by the National Health Authority (NHA). It aims to create longitudinal, patient-controlled health records for every citizen by connecting patients, healthcare professionals, and health facilities through a set of open, interoperable APIs.

Why ABDM exists

Health data in India has historically been fragmented across hospitals, labs, clinics, and paper records. ABDM solves this by providing:

• A unique health identity for every citizen — the ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account).
• Verified registries of healthcare professionals (HPR) and facilities (HFR).
• A consent-first exchange layer — no health data moves without an explicit, auditable, revocable patient consent artefact managed by the HIE-CM.
• Federated data storage — records stay with the systems that created them (hospitals, labs); ABDM only routes and orchestrates the exchange.

The ecosystem at a glance

Every integrated system plays one or more roles:

Role	Meaning	Example
HIP	Health Information Provider — holds patient records and shares them on consent	Hospital HMIS, lab system, clinic EMR
HIU	Health Information User — requests and consumes records with consent	Doctor's app, insurance system, PHR app
HRP	Health Repository Provider — hosts HIP/HIU capabilities for facilities that lack their own software	Cloud HMIS vendors
PHR app	Patient-facing app for managing ABHA, consents, and records	ABHA app, third-party PHR apps

A single application can be both HIP and HIU — for example a hospital that shares its own records and views records from other facilities.

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