Several people who have received their first Covid-19 vaccine doses have been o bserving a unique health ID number on their Covid-19 vaccine certificates.
HIGHLIGHTS
- A unique health ID number is causing confusion among several people who are seeing it for the first time on their vaccine certificates.
- The number is seemingly being generated at the vaccine centres without the people’s consent.
- Only some basic information is needed to generate a person’s health ID.
More than 19 crore Indians have been vaccinated against Covid-19 to date, as per the latest data by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The number stands tall amid a nation battling a severe outbreak of the disease for the second time since the pandemic began last year. However, the increasing number of vaccinations has shed light on yet another drive that seems to be ongoing away from the general information of the citizens.
People who have received their first dose of vaccination against Covid-19 are observing a Unique Health ID (UHID) or Health ID on their vaccine certificate. While some have been aware of such an initiative by the government of India, many are not clear on its purpose just yet. The new form of identification is hence fast becoming a cause of confusion and concern among citizens.
What is even more perplexing for people is that they have seemingly no idea of how this ID was formed. An increasing number of posts on social media platforms point out that there was no “consent” taken or information provided to the users before the generation of this UHID.
However alien the UHID may seem, note that it is not a new concept and has been highlighted by the government of India on several occasions before. Here is a look at what exactly is the Health ID as per the government.
The health ID comes as a part of the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) initiative by the government of India. As per the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, NDHM is aimed to enable a seamless integration of digital health infrastructure in the country. In short, the initiative is a step towards digitising healthcare in India.
For NDHM to work, the plan is to employ a series of digital systems across the healthcare infrastructure in the country. These systems will collectively cover healthcare facilities, workers, health records and, of course, patients and their medical histories.
Health ID is one such key system to enable NDHM. As per information shared on the NDHM website, health IDs will help “standardise the process of identification of an individual across healthcare providers.” The website says that this is the only way to ensure that the created medical records “are issued to the correct individual or accessed by Health Information User through appropriate consent.”
The website clearly indicates that once generated, these Health IDs will be used for the purposes of “uniquely identifying persons, authenticating them, and threading their health records (only with the informed consent of the patient) across multiple systems and stakeholders.”
In a nutshell, health IDs will be the master key to all individuals’ health records from across locations and healthcare facilities.
The “informed consent”
Now, this is where the concept of health IDs becomes a little mind-boggling for anyone who has come across the term recently. While their intended use is crystal clear, who generated them for all those being vaccinated is a question no one seems to have an answer to.