The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is India’s national digital health initiative, run by the National Health Authority (NHA). It builds the shared infrastructure, a unique health ID, provider and facility registries, and a consent-based exchange, that lets a patient’s clinical records move with them across providers.

What are the main building blocks of ABDM?

Four components: ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account, a 14-digit health ID), the Health Facility Registry (HFR), the Health Professional Registry (HPR), and the Health Information Exchange and Consent Manager (HIE-CM), through which records are shared on consent.

ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account) is a 14-digit unique health identifier any Indian resident can create. It acts as the patient’s anchor identity across the ABDM ecosystem, linking clinical records from multiple providers to a single, patient-controlled account, subject to consent.

Does ABDM store all health records in a central database?

No. ABDM uses a federated architecture. Records stay at the originating facility and are shared only when the patient gives explicit, time-bound, revocable consent through the HIE-CM. No single repository holds all of a patient’s data.

What is the difference between ABDM and NHCX?

ABDM is the broader national digital health infrastructure. NHCX is one gateway within it, focused on insurance claims between providers and payers. A separate ABDM gateway, the HIE-CM, handles consent-based sharing of clinical records. ABDM/HIE-CM solves clinical-data fragmentation; NHCX solves claims fragmentation.

What data standards does ABDM use?

ABDM mandates HL7 FHIR R4 as the transport standard and ICD-10, SNOMED CT, and LOINC as clinical coding standards, defined in the FHIR Implementation Guide for ABDM maintained by NRCeS (a C-DAC body).

Why does India need ABDM if hospitals already have software?

Most facilities store records in incompatible formats, and full EHR adoption remains low outside large hospital chains. Without a shared identifier, provider directory, consent layer, and FHIR interoperability standards, records cannot move between providers. ABDM supplies exactly that shared substrate.

What Is ABDM? The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission Explained

A plain-language reference guide to India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission.

What is ABDM?

The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is India’s national digital health infrastructure, run by the National Health Authority (NHA). Its goal is straightforward: make a patient’s clinical records able to travel with the patient across hospitals, cities, and providers, securely and on the patient’s terms.

ABDM is not a single app or database. It is a set of shared building blocks, a unique health ID, national registries of facilities and professionals, and a consent-based exchange, that any healthcare application can plug into. Crucially, it is built on a federated model: records stay where they were created and are shared only when the patient consents. No central repository holds everyone’s data.

Why does ABDM exist? The problem it solves

India’s healthcare network spans hundreds of thousands of facilities, public and private, large and small, each operating as an independent information silo. Patient records, lab results, imaging, and discharge summaries are stored at the facility that generated them, in whatever format it uses.

The result is clinical-data fragmentation: when a patient moves between providers, their history usually does not follow. A specialist in one city has no access to a scan taken in another, so tests get repeated, context is lost, and care continuity suffers.

This is a different problem from claims fragmentation (the gap between providers and insurers), which NHCX addresses. ABDM was designed specifically to close the clinical-data gap by supplying the shared identifier, directories, consent layer, and interoperability standards that fragmented systems lack.

The building blocks of ABDM

ABDM’s response rests on four interconnected components:

Component	What it is	Role
ABHA	Ayushman Bharat Health Account — a 14-digit unique health ID	The patient’s anchor identity; links records from many providers to one consent-controlled account
HFR	Health Facility Registry	A verified national directory of healthcare facilities
HPR	Health Professional Registry	A verified national directory of healthcare professionals
HIE-CM	Health Information Exchange & Consent Manager	The gateway through which records are actually shared, on consent

Together, ABHA identifies the patient, HFR and HPR identify who is exchanging data, and HIE-CM governs how records move.

How does ABDM work?

ABDM operates on a federated, consent-first architecture:

Identity. A patient creates an ABHA, which links their records across participating providers.
Discovery. HFR and HPR provide the verified directory of facilities and professionals that can participate.
Consent. When records need to move, the patient grants explicit, time-bound, and revocable consent through the HIE-CM.
Exchange. The record is shared directly from the originating facility to the requesting provider in a standardized FHIR format. Data is not pooled centrally.

ABDM mandates open standards, HL7 FHIR R4 for transport and ICD-10, SNOMED CT, and LOINC for clinical coding, defined in the FHIR Implementation Guide maintained by NRCeS (a C-DAC body), so records are interpreted consistently across systems.

ABDM’s three core gateways

ABDM exposes three core gateways, each for a different job:

HIE-CM — consent-based exchange of clinical records between providers.
NHCX — standardized exchange of insurance claims between providers and payers. See What Is NHCX?
UHI (Unified Health Interface) — open service discovery and transactions (e.g., finding and booking care).

A common point of confusion: NHCX moves claims; HIE-CM moves clinical records. Both live inside ABDM.

What does ABDM change for each stakeholder?

Patients: one portable health identity, control over who sees their records, and fewer repeated tests and lost histories.
Hospitals and providers: records that can be retrieved on consent rather than via courier or a photo of a discharge summary; ABDM keeps facilities as custodians of their own data under the federated model.
Health-tech builders: a standard substrate (IDs, registries, FHIR, consent) to build on, instead of bespoke per-hospital integrations.

Where ABDM stands today

Adoption at the identity and record layers has scaled rapidly, while deeper interoperability is still being built out:

ABHA accounts: over 86.64 crore (~866 million) created as of March 2026.
Linked health records: about 90.70 crore as of March 2026.
Registries: roughly 4.17 lakh facilities on HFR and 6.76 lakh professionals on HPR (as of July 2025).
Active software: about 2,56,542 facilities actively using ABDM-enabled software (as of March 2026), the gap from registration reflecting that FHIR-ready integration is still ongoing.

Early operational wins are visible too: the Scan-and-Share feature (retrieving patient details via ABHA at OPD) was live across 17,481 facilities by November 2024 and cut OPD wait times from 30–40 minutes to roughly 5–10 minutes at integrated facilities.

The pattern mirrors other Indian digital public infrastructure: the rails and identity layer first, then a multi-year ramp in functional interoperability, especially across smaller private and rural public facilities.

Key terms

ABHA: the 14-digit Ayushman Bharat Health Account that anchors a patient’s identity in ABDM.
HIE-CM: the Health Information Exchange and Consent Manager that brokers consent-based record sharing.
Federated architecture: data stays at the originating facility; nothing is pooled in one central store.
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources): the HL7 standard ABDM mandates so records are structured and portable.
NRCeS: the National Resource Centre for EHR Standards (under C-DAC) that maintains ABDM’s FHIR Implementation Guide.

Learn more

This page is the hub of our ABDM coverage. To go deeper:

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