👥Trusted registries in Healthcare

Healthcare is a highly sensitive and regulated sector. Its success is completely dependent on how much “trust” a country can bring in ensuring accessible and safe healthcare across the multimodal (physical & virtual) health delivery ecosystem.

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

A fundamental issue plaguing current healthcare systems is the lack of dependable and accessible single source 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 (and prevent clunky PDF or Excel downloads) to ensure systems can directly access the information;

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.