The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission is the national plan to make health records portable between clinics, hospitals and labs. Over 640 million ABHA numbers have been issued. If your records cannot travel, your patients start again at every door they walk through.
What compliance actually requires
Three things, and the third is where almost every vendor stops short.
- ABHA identity, so a patient is the same person at your clinic and the next one
- Consent-based sharing, records move because the patient allowed it, not because two systems agreed
- Coded clinical data, a diagnosis stored as a code from a recognised terminology, not as typed text
That last one is the difference between compliance and a marketing claim. “Sugar”, “DM”, “diabetes” and “diabetes mellitus type 2” are one condition and four strings. No system downstream can act on strings. SNOMED CT gives that condition one code, everywhere.
Why the licence number is the test
SNOMED CT is licensed by SNOMED International, and in India that licence is administered through the National Resource Centre for EHR Standards. It is not a library you download. A vendor either holds an Affiliate Licence or does not, and the number is checkable.
Medigent holds SNOMED CT Affiliate Licence 1743442. Verify it with SNOMED International. When you are evaluating any other vendor, ask for their number in writing. The answer tells you more than a features page.
What this changes in your clinic
- Diagnoses are coded as you write them, from the prescription screen, without you learning a coding system
- Records export in FHIR R4, the format the rest of Indian health IT is standardising on
- A patient can be identified by ABHA, rather than by a phone number that changed last year
- Sharing happens on consent, recorded, timestamped and revocable
Compliance is not a switch you flip. Coding is only useful if it happens while you work. Diagnoses are coded at the point you write the prescription, so the record is compliant because of how it was created, not because someone cleaned it up afterwards.
Where your data sits
On our own servers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region, under a signed Business Associate Agreement. Call recordings and consultation transcripts have never left that infrastructure and are not sent to a foreign cloud for storage. Handling follows India’s DPDP Act, and the clinic remains the Data Fiduciary while Medigent is the Processor.
Questions doctors actually ask
What is ABDM and does my clinic have to comply?
ABDM is the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, India's national programme for portable health records. There is no blanket legal obligation on a private clinic today, but government schemes, insurers and hospital networks increasingly expect ABDM-compatible records, and a clinic that cannot share a record loses referrals it never hears about.
What is an ABHA number?
An ABHA number, formerly a Health ID, is a 14-digit identifier that belongs to the patient rather than to any clinic. It lets the same person be recognised across clinics, hospitals and labs, so their history follows them instead of restarting at each front desk.
Why does SNOMED CT matter more than the ABDM logo on a website?
Because sharing a record is useless if the receiving system cannot read it. SNOMED CT is the clinical terminology that turns a typed diagnosis into a code every system understands. ABDM compliance depends on it, the licence is checkable, and Medigent's is 1743442.
Do I have to learn SNOMED codes?
No. You write the diagnosis the way you always do and the coding happens underneath. You never see a code unless you go looking for one.