India, Amazon Web Services team up on digital health IDs

India’s central government and Amazon Web Services began work last month on a digital ID platform targeting Indian citizens.

The platform, called U-WIN, is a repurposed model of the country’s COVID-19 vaccine registration portal used during the pandemic. That platform, initially named CoWIN, was also built by AWS using Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure.

With U-WIN, Indian citizens can be assigned digital health IDs that will be tied to “longitudinal health records” which contain all their health data electronically. No longer limited to tracking COVID-19 shots, the platform will keep track of all universal vaccinations including diphtheria, Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG), polio, tetanus and others.

The platform will also include a “nutritional health monitor” for roughly 100 million pregnant women, new mothers and infants called the Poshan Tracker. 

“From the moment a child is born, there is a longitudinal health record,” AWS India Enterprises, Government & Healthcare Leader Pankaj Gupta told Business Standard. “We can call this database that maintains a health record that is cradle to grave. It is now also being integrated with platforms centered around maternal and child health. As far as health is concerned, the government of India is looking at a lot of policy intervention.”

AWS is also developing a Unified Health Interface (UHI) which will enable “interoperability in healthcare.”

“Today, when you go from one hospital to another, you have to carry all your physical health records,” Gupta explained. “But now there will be no need because it will be all stored in a central repository, the way we had DigiLocker.”

DigiLocker is another initiative of the Indian government which serves as a digital ID wallet for citizens where they can store their government-issued documents electronically.

In its efforts to digitize health records and achieve “healthcare interoperability” India has taken pointers from Israel’s Health Ministry, which operates such a system. 

It was that system which Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used in 2020 to negotiate the world’s first delivery of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.

“I persuaded [Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla] to give tiny Israel the necessary vaccines to get us out first from the COVID,” said Netanyahu in an interview. “And the reason I could do that is because we have . . . a medical database — 98% of our population has digitized medical records with a little card and anywhere you go in any hospital in Israel — north, south, it doesn’t make any differenc e—boom, you punch it in and you know everything about this patient for the last twenty years. 

“I said, ‘We’ll use that to tell you whether these vaccines — what do they do to people?’ . . . So Israel became, if you will, the lab for Pfizer.”