India rolls out National Health Terminology Service, ending medical data chaos

India has taken a significant step in building out its Digital Public Infrastructure for healthcare, with Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda launching a set of platforms designed to solve one of the sector’s most persistent operational problems: the absence of a common language for medical data. At the centre of the rollout are two linked systems built by the National Resource Centre for EHR Standards (NRCeS) and the National Health Authority (NHA), the Bharat Health Terminology Service (BHTS) and the Common Lab Codes for India (CLCI).

The gap these systems address is structural rather than cosmetic. India’s hospitals, labs and clinics run on a patchwork of electronic health record systems, each of which has historically been free to log the same clinical event in different ways. A diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes might appear as “Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus” in one system, “T2DM” in another, and simply “sugar” in a third. A clinician can reconcile these variations; software cannot. The result has been duplicate testing, slower insurance processing, and health records that do not travel cleanly between providers, friction that runs directly counter to the goal of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which has focused on building record volume without fully solving for how that data is interpreted across systems.

BHTS is designed to close that gap. It functions as a centralised, FHIR-compliant terminology server that gives hospitals, digital health platforms and software vendors open API access to standardised clinical vocabularies, code systems and value sets. It incorporates international standards such as SNOMED CT for conditions, procedures and anatomy, and maps them to Indian regional languages, so that a clinical event recorded at a private hospital and one recorded at a rural primary health centre resolve to the same underlying code.

CLCI addresses the equivalent problem on the diagnostics side. Built by NRCeS Pune as a curated, India-specific subset of LOINC, the international standard for identifying laboratory tests and clinical measurements, it gives common lab tests a single, machine-readable code that specifies what was measured, how, and from what type of specimen. That level of precision is what allows a lab result generated in one city to be read correctly by a hospital system in another, and to flow directly into a patient’s personal health record on platforms such as the revamped Aarogya Setu app.

The commercial and operational implications extend across the healthcare value chain. For hospitals and diagnostic chains, standardised coding should reduce redundant testing when patients move between providers, lowering costs for both operators and patients. For insurers, the National Health Claims Exchange can use structured, standardised clinical data to automate claims verification, a change that is expected to compress approval timelines from days to minutes rather than requiring manual adjudication. For EMR and health-tech vendors, compliance with BHTS and CLCI is likely to become a baseline requirement for interoperability with ABDM-linked systems, reshaping product roadmaps across the industry. The terminology service also connects to the newly introduced National Drug Registry, assigning distinct digital identifiers to more than 1.23 lakh medicines to reduce prescribing errors involving similarly named drugs.

The scale of the underlying infrastructure gives this initiative more weight than a typical standards update. India has already generated over 90 crore ABHA health accounts and linked more than 100 crore health records, making it one of the largest digital health identity systems in the world. That scale has, until now, outpaced the semantic infrastructure needed to make the data genuinely interoperable, a large, well-populated database is not the same as a functioning, machine-readable health record system.

Whether BHTS and CLCI deliver on their potential will depend less on the technical architecture, which appears largely complete, and more on adoption. State health departments, hospital IT systems and private EMR vendors will need to build the new codes into their existing software, a process that typically lags behind policy announcements in large, decentralised healthcare markets. As India’s health system moves toward automated clinical decision support and AI-assisted public health monitoring, common terminology is a prerequisite rather than an optional upgrade, and the government has now put the foundational layer in place for that next phase.
MB Bureau