The ABDM checklist every Indian hospital should finish this year

The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is no longer a pilot. Government schemes, insurers and increasingly patients expect hospitals to be on it. Yet most hospitals we meet have created a handful of ABHA numbers at the front desk and stopped there.

Here is the checklist we work through with every hospital, in the order that produces results fastest.

1. Register the facility and the professionals

Two registries come first:

• Health Facility Registry (HFR): your hospital's entry in the national directory. Each branch registers separately.
• Health Professional Registry (HPR): every doctor who will sign records or prescriptions.

Both are free and take days, not weeks. Assign one administrator, collect registration numbers and identity documents, and do it once.

2. Create ABHA numbers where patients already give you an ID

Registration is where you already collect a phone number and, often, an Aadhaar. Creating an ABHA number at that moment adds under a minute if your HMS supports it inline. Asking patients to do it later on an app does not work; adoption falls to near zero.

What to demand from your HMS:

• ABHA creation and verification inside the registration screen, not a separate portal
• Consent captured and stored with the ABHA transaction
• Duplicate detection so one patient does not end up with three records

3. Link records, not just numbers

An ABHA number on a registration form has no value until clinical records are linked to it. Discharge summaries, prescriptions, lab reports and radiology reports should be pushed to the patient's ABHA-linked apps when they consent.

This is where legacy systems fail. If your HMS stores the discharge summary as a scanned PDF with no structure, linking is manual and nobody does it.

4. Prepare for NHCX

The National Health Claims Exchange standardises claims between hospitals, TPAs and insurers. It is the part of ABDM that directly affects your cash flow. Ask your HMS vendor when NHCX submission will work end to end, not whether it is "on the roadmap".

5. Treat DPDP as part of the same project

ABDM is built on consent. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act makes your hospital a data fiduciary. Do them together: consent capture, purpose limitation, and the ability to answer a patient who asks what data you hold about them.

The one question to ask your vendor

"Can you show me, live, a patient registered with ABHA, a discharge summary linked to it, and an NHCX-ready claim generated from the same record?"

If the answer is a slide instead of a screen, you have your answer.

RevSyn Care is designed for ABDM and ABHA connectivity where implemented. If you want to see the flow above on your own data, book a demo.