As health goes digital in India, where does privacy stand?

New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences is renowned for the quality and popularity of its medical services. Interestingly, the hospital has also served as an important testbed for many of India’s digital health initiatives. It was among the first to adopt the National Informatics Center’s e-Hospital system, a cloud-based hospital management information system.

In 2016, the hospital announced free registration for patients who furnish their Aadhaar ID. More recently, it has also started integrating the Health Ministry’s new universal health ID scheme – the Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts IDs – with its systems.

Riding on this digitisation wave, in October 2022, AIIMS announced that it would go completely paperless by the start of 2023. But less than a month later, the hospital’s digital systems came to a complete halt following a major cyber attack.

The hackers took over the servers of AIIMS and encrypted the data on it, making it impossible for the hospital to access its own systems. This forced an unplanned switch back to manual processes resulting in significant delays and inconvenience. At the same time, the incident compromised the privacy of 30 to 40 million individuals whose data is reported to have been exposed in the attack.

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