👥Trusted registries in Healthcare

Healthcare is a highly sensitive and regulated sector. Its success depends entirely on the level of “trust” a country can establish in ensuring accessible and safe healthcare across the multimodal (physical and virtual) health delivery ecosystem.

Verifying ID and accessing profile data of any ‘noun’ in an ecosystem: people, entities, or objects, is a crucial foundational function of any economy. When moving from physical to remote or digital interactions, the first complication is establishing trust in the identity of the counterparty. This identity must be verifiable: that is, it can be authenticated by some means, such as a mobile one-time password, a biometric fingerprint scan, or face ID authentication.

A fundamental issue plaguing current healthcare systems is the lack of dependable and accessible single sources of truth. There are certain foundational data lists that every solution needs to operate. In healthcare, these include lists of qualified medical professionals, medical institutions, insurers, etc. Multiple health programs tend to maintain their isolated versions of these lists, and every new player ends up having to recollect this information. As a result, this information is not verifiable, not reusable, and rarely up to date.

Electronic registries are structured, live identification systems that maintain standardised, updated data records compliant with standards/schema, ensuring a 'Single Source of Truth' for entities and offering access via open APIs. In contrast, conventional databases provide a way to simply store and manage the data. Databases may have structured data records but may not necessarily be compliant with any standard/schema, and are not sharable, verifiable or authenticable.

Countries might be in different stages of their registry implementation ranging from a simple database to a mature registry as is illustrated here.

Registries should provide:

1) Digitally signed data to ensure it is tamper-proof.

2) Open APIs to ensure systems can directly access the information without relying on clunky PDF or Excel downloads.

3) Machine-readable data to allow algorithms and systems to process and analyse it easily in service of individuals.

This greatly enhances accessibility and speed, reduces the cost of service delivery, and triggers competition and innovation across market players. For more detailed information on registries, see here

As a rule of thumb, if the core data is likely to change often over time it should not be in a registry! Registries are most useful for a minimal set of data fields which tend to stay constant.