UHI shall be the UPI moment for digital health service delivery: Dr. R S Sharma

Mumbai: Speaking at IFTA 2022, hosted by India FinTech Forum, a not-for-profit fintech advocacy group representing Indian fintech companies, Dr. R.S. Sharma, CEO, National Health Authority, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, said that just like UPI revolutionized payment transactions in India, Unified Health Interface (UHI) will revolutionize digital health service delivery.

UPI has made India the world’s largest real time payments player. In a short period, UPI transaction volume has surpassed the combined volume of credit and debit cards. “With digital transactions and transparency at the core of UHI, this would mean positive outcomes for users, health service providers as well as the transacted entities,” Dr. Sharma said.

“UHI facilitates the ease of doing business for health care service providers by granting them access to a large number of users, through the medium of a common platform. This paradigm shift in healthcare delivery also gives rise to a sea of opportunities for the emerging HealthTech ecosystem. A rapidly evolving digital health sector allows for more innovation and emergence of new services in digital health that have not been possible before.”, he added.

In the healthcare system, e-RUPI is the new fintech initiative for instant payment to healthcare service providers in AB-PMJAY. It is a person and purpose specific digital instrument based on the architecture of UPI. Talking about the benefits of e-RUPI in healthcare, he further added, “e-RUPI will have myriad use cases: to start with health, nutrition, education and agriculture are just a few areas that are going to benefit from it. A number of states have already started using e-RUPI for various benefit delivery programs in their states.”

Dr. Sharma believes that it is time that we innovate new products in the fintech industry which could be combined with healthtech for an affordable, scalable and accessible digital healthcare ecosystem. He mentioned that he is looking forward to seeing such innovations in fintech to become the foundation of real change in India.

IFTA 2022 is a 3-day conference being held between November 28-29 (online) and November 30 (in-person) at Mumbai. Among the host of leading and emerging leaders who will be speaking at the conference are Sugandh Saxena, CEO, FACE, Mukesh Kalra, Founder & CEO, ET Money, Kunal Varma, CEO & Co- Founder, Freo, Prakarsh Gagdani, CEO, 5paisa.com, Vikram Chachra, Founding Partner, 8i Ventures, Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures Advisors, Ranjan Bhattacharya, MD, Head of Strategy and Chief of Staff, HSBC India, Deepak Sharma, President and Chief Digital Officer, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Prasanna Lohar, Chief Executive Officer, Block Stack, Dewang Neralla, CEO, NTT DATA Payment Services India and Anil Kuril, CTO, Union Bank of India among others.

The discussions at 7th Annual IFTA will focus on financial inclusion and emerging technologies. Mr. Sougata Basu, Founder, CashRich and Executive Committee Member of India FinTech Forum, said, “IFTA 2022 will give us an opportunity to see some amazing innovation from global fintech firms. Today Dr. R.S. Sharma, CEO, NHA spoke at IFTA and inspired entrepreneurs to build unique solutions that are at the intersection of Fintech and HealthTech. We will most likely see a few Indian unicorns emerge in this area in the next 3-5 years.”

Prominent companies including Perfios, Happay, CashRich, Think360.AI, EnKash, Biz2X, Ring, Dhan, JuicyScore, TransUnion CIBIL, Feedzai, Veefin, Deloitte, Fisdom and Xoxoday have come together to power discussions on the opportunities for upcoming technologies, challenges and way forward to capitalize on the next 2-3 years.