The acronyms, defined once.
Indian public health technology runs on an alphabet of registries, schemes, and standards that rarely get explained in one place. This is that place — plain-language definitions of the terms used across this site, each linked back to where it matters in practice.
Jump to a term
- ABDMAyushman Bharat Digital Mission
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India's national digital health mission, launched 2021, that specifies the interoperability standards and core registries — ABHA, HFR, HPR — a state or private health system connects to in order to exchange patient data across facilities. ABDM sets the rules; it doesn't operate any individual state's systems.
→ Read the registry-adoption brief - ABHAAyushman Bharat Health Account
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The patient-facing 14-digit health ID under ABDM — a voluntary digital health identity a citizen creates once and uses across any facility that participates in the network, so their records can, in principle, follow them between providers. Over 90 crore have been issued as of mid-2026.
→ Read the adoption-gap brief - HFRHealth Facility Registry
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ABDM's registry of verified health facilities — hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres, pharmacies — that lets other systems confirm a facility is real and authorised before exchanging data with it. Registration alone doesn't mean a facility is actively transacting through ABDM; see the registry-adoption brief for the gap between the two.
→ Read the registry-adoption brief
→ See Tech Infra Advisory - HPRHealth Professional Registry
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ABDM's registry of verified doctors, nurses, and allied health workers — the credentialing layer that lets a system confirm the professional on the other end of a digital prescription or record actually holds the qualification they claim.
→ Read the registry-adoption brief - PM-JAYPradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana
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The health insurance component of Ayushman Bharat — one of the world's largest government-funded health assurance schemes, providing cashless secondary and tertiary care coverage to eligible low-income households. Its claims-integrity gaps are the subject of the audit-trail brief below.
→ Read the audit-trail brief - HMISHealth Management Information System
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The umbrella term for the software a state or facility uses to record and report health data — patient records, service delivery, disease surveillance, resource tracking. Most Indian states run some form of HMIS already; the modernisation problem is rarely building one from scratch, usually integrating or replacing what already exists.
→ See Tech Infra Advisory - PFMSPublic Financial Management System
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The Government of India's central platform for tracking fund flow and payments across government schemes, run by the Controller General of Accounts. State and central health scheme disbursements typically move through or alongside PFMS rails — infrastructure built to integrate with, not duplicate.
→ See Financial Technology - DBTDirect Benefit Transfer
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India's mechanism for transferring scheme benefits — cash, subsidies, or reimbursements — directly to a beneficiary's bank account, intended to cut out intermediary leakage. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the beneficiary and payment data behind it being accurate, which is where claims-integrity checks matter most.
→ See Financial Technology - CAGComptroller and Auditor General of India
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India's supreme audit institution, constitutionally mandated to audit government spending, including centrally sponsored health schemes. CAG audits are periodic and sample-based by necessity — the case for a live accountability layer is that it catches what a yearly audit structurally can't.
→ Read the audit-trail brief - NHANational Health Authority
- The apex body that implements ABDM and PM-JAY at the national level, and the primary source of the adoption and registry figures cited throughout this site.
- FHIRFast Healthcare Interoperability Resources
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The international technical standard (from HL7) that ABDM's own APIs are built on for exchanging clinical data between systems — the actual data format underneath the registries and consent flows, and the standard a state's HMIS has to speak to integrate cleanly rather than through a custom, one-off connector.
→ See Tech Infra Advisory - DPDP ActDigital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023
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India's principal data protection law, with its operational Rules notified in November 2025 on an 18-month phased timeline to full compliance by mid-2027. Every state health system processing ABHA-linked or scheme data is a data fiduciary under it — consent, data minimisation, breach notification, and patient access/erasure rights all apply.
→ Read the DPDP compliance brief - Mandate-to-Ground FrameworkONRAV's four-stage engagement framework
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Mandate → Architecture → Deployment → Accountability — the sequence every ONRAV engagement moves through, so the people who wrote the policy, architected the system, deployed it, and now audit it are working from the same document.
→ Read the full framework - Accountability LayerONRAV's term for Stage 04 infrastructure
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The live reporting, validation, and audit-trail infrastructure built in from Stage 01 of an engagement — not a dashboard added after a programme is already live, but the same pipeline that processes a claim or a report also checking it as it moves.
→ See Stage 04 — Accountability
This glossary covers the terms used across ONRAV's own site — it's a working reference, not an exhaustive dictionary of Indian health policy. If a term you've encountered elsewhere in a scheme document or state HMIS spec isn't here and you'd find it useful, let us know.
Trying to make sense of a scheme's own jargon?
Half of what slows a programme down is nobody agreeing on what the acronyms in the specification actually mean. That's a fixable problem.
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