Centre to launch a national public health observatory for integration of government schemes

The Union Health Ministry is preparing a portal that will serve as an observatory for all public health programme-related data in India.

The National Public Health Observatory (NHPO) will have an integrated command control centre to monitor the policy implication framework across all states for public health programmes in India, said a ministry official, who did not want to be identified.

The concept behind NHPO will be to analyse ongoing programmes, and based on that analysis, strategies will be prepared for public policy-related implications.

“During a health emergency, this data observatory will act as a data control centre, it will also help in core policy planning otherwise,” the official added.

The observatory will help the centre and states access information about any new disease outbreak, the official said. The policy implication framework for monitoring diseases and outbreaks will be drawn up at this integrated command centre.

The Centre aims to integrate the data collected from different sources to utilise it for emergency management or policy planning in future.

According to the official, the health readiness index framework at NHPO will integrate the data under eight categories; population profile, healthcare infrastructure, healthcare financing and coverage, disease burden and surveillance, healthcare human resources, performance of public health programmes, digital health, and non-healthcare social wellbeing indicators.

In phase 0 of NHPO, applications like Oxygen Demand Aggregation System (ODAS), Oxygen Digital Tracking System (ODTS), CoWIN, Aarogya Setu and INSACOG have already been integrated into the system.

“In the next stage, cross Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) identification is in progress,” the official said.

The observatory will be linked to several public health programmes .

Various government programmes miss out on several key KPIs because of the unavailability of a unified database, said the official.

“Today the Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) application, the maternal child application, has no database to register that women are suffering from tuberculosis, whereas the TB platform doesn’t have a similar database on pregnant women, so this observatory aims to end that digital data divide,” he said. “If this digital data is integrated under NHPO, we will have a large database where we can know the percentage of pregnant ladies suffering from tuberculosis in India,” he added.

The Union Health Ministry will be using the expertise of the Center for Health and Informatics for this process.