HIP & HIU

Every data exchange in ABDM happens between a Health Information Provider (HIP) and a Health Information User (HIU), mediated by the patient's consent manager.

HIP — Health Information Provider

An HIP is any system that holds patient health records: hospital HMIS, lab systems, clinic EMRs, pharmacies.

An HIP must implement:

Capability	What it means
Care context linking	Attach visits/episodes to a patient's ABHA (HIP-initiated or patient-initiated)
Discovery	Answer "do you have records for this patient?" queries from the CM
User authentication	Verify the patient (e.g. OTP demographic match) during patient-initiated linking
Consent notification handling	Receive artefacts relevant to its records
Data provision	Build, encrypt, and push FHIR bundles when a valid consent + data request arrives

HIU — Health Information User

An HIU is any system that needs to view patient records: a doctor's console in an HMIS, a telemedicine app, an insurance claims system.

An HIU must implement:

Capability	What it means
Consent requests	Ask the patient for access with explicit purpose, HI types, and date range
Consent lifecycle handling	React to grant, deny, expiry, revocation
Health information requests	Request data against granted artefacts
Data reception	Host a data-push endpoint, decrypt bundles, verify integrity
Display & purge	Render FHIR records and erase them at the artefact's expiry

One system, both roles

Most full HMIS products are both: they share the records they create (HIP) and let their clinicians view records from elsewhere (HIU). The roles are registered on the same bridge but keyed by different IDs (X-HIP-ID / X-HIU-ID).

flowchart LR
  subgraph Hospital A — your HMIS
      HIPA["HIP role<br/>shares OPD records"]
      HIUA["HIU role<br/>doctor views history"]
  end
  CM["HIE-CM"]
  HIPB["Hospital B (HIP)"]
  HIUA -- "consent request" --> CM
  CM -- "consent artefact" --> HIPB
  HIPB -. "encrypted records" .-> HIUA
  HIPA -- "links & shares" --> CM