Post by Roopa Naidu Gurram

I spent a decade watching the US healthcare system pay billions to make EMRs talk to each other. It still hasn't worked. India might solve this in a fraction of the time — and at a fraction of the cost. Here's what's different about ABDM: The US built digital health on top of existing infrastructure — fragmented, proprietary, and expensive to maintain. Every large health system has its own EMR. Interoperability became an afterthought, bolted on after the fact. The result? Administrative bloat, data silos and a $1.51 trillion Industry that exists just to bridge systems that should never have been separate. India started with a different question: what if health data infrastructure were treated like public rails? That's exactly what ABDM does. Like UPI in fintech, it establishes a shared, open layer — a unique health ID, consent-based data access, and federated records that follow the patient, not the provider. The US had legacy systems to protect. India had legacy systems to skip. This isn't just a policy win. For product builders in Indian healthtech, it changes the entire design space. You're not building workarounds for broken interoperability — you're building on top of a foundation that assumes it. We're still early. Adoption is uneven, consent frameworks need strengthening, and the gap between policy and ground-level implementation is real. But the architecture is right. And in healthtech, that's often the hardest part.   #IndiaHealthtech #ABDM #DigitalHealth #HealthPolicy #ProductThinking