The government today announced the launch of the national health portal in Delhi. The portal aims to serve as a repository of medical history of one billion Indians. The portal is funded by the union ministry of health and family welfare, and is being developed by the centre of health informatics, national institute of health & family welfare.

The portal will be a single point of access to public health informatics including conceptualisation, design, development, deployment, refinement, maintenance and evaluation of information systems relevant to public health. “Inadequate or poor health information can increase the risk of hospitalisation or even disease burden. Therefore, availability of reliable, high quality health information is important for the promotion of health among the population,” said Prof Suptendra Nath Sarbhadhikari, project director, centre for health informatics.

Cloud computing services from BSNL IDC together with Dimension Data, have been chosen to host India's national health portal using public compute-as-a-service (CaaS).

“Being a government of India enterprise, we understand the needs of ministries and government departments. Our IDC and cloud services are targeted at providing a secure and efficient IT platform for the use of government departments with minimal upfront investment and a pay-as-you-go model. Our reach to even the most remote areas in India will be a phenomenal advantage to an initiative like the National Health Portal,” said RK Upadhyay, chairman and MD, BSNL.

BSNL IDC was chosen from a stringent process of selection. Location of data centres within the physical boundaries of India, ISO 27000:1, SSAE and ISAE certification and a guaranteed uptime of 99.95 per cent were some of the reasons that worked in its favour. The contract has initially been signed for three years in which the cloud service provider would be the single point of contact for any requirements of the portal.

“Being based right here in India, our services ensure data sovereignty requirements are complied with. We are excited about enabling the National Health Portal to serve as the definitive source of health information in India,” said Kiran Bhagwanani, chief executive officer, Dimension Data India.

Data about medical histories of patients will be regularly added to the National Health Portal and accordingly new features will be developed to store, access and manage the data.