India has introduced a major digital health initiative aimed at standardising the way medical information is recorded and shared across the country. Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda launched two new platforms the Bharat Health Terminology Service (BHTS) and the Common Lab Codes for India (CLCI) developed by the National Resource Centre for EHR Standards (NRCeS) in collaboration with the National Health Authority (NHA).
The initiative addresses a long-standing challenge in India’s healthcare ecosystem: the lack of uniformity in medical terminology across hospitals, laboratories and clinics. Different healthcare providers often use different names or abbreviations for the same disease or clinical condition. For example, a patient with Type 2 diabetes may have their diagnosis recorded as “Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus,” “T2DM,” or simply “sugar” depending on the healthcare facility. While healthcare professionals can interpret these variations, computer systems cannot, creating barriers to seamless data exchange.
This inconsistency has led to fragmented electronic health records, repeated diagnostic tests, delays in insurance claim processing and difficulties in sharing patient records between healthcare providers. These issues have posed a significant challenge to the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which has successfully created a vast repository of digital health records but required a common framework to ensure those records could be accurately interpreted across different systems.
The newly launched Bharat Health Terminology Service (BHTS) aims to bridge this gap by serving as a centralised, FHIR-compliant terminology platform. Through open APIs, it enables hospitals, digital health platforms and software developers to access standardised medical vocabularies, coding systems and value sets. The platform incorporates globally recognised standards such as SNOMED CT for diseases, procedures and anatomical terms while also mapping them to Indian regional languages. This ensures that the same clinical condition is assigned a uniform digital code regardless of where it is recorded.
Complementing this effort, the Common Lab Codes for India (CLCI) standardises laboratory reporting. Developed by NRCeS Pune as an India-specific subset of the international LOINC standard, CLCI assigns unique machine-readable codes to commonly performed laboratory tests. These codes identify the test performed, the specimen used and the method of analysis, enabling laboratory reports generated in one healthcare facility to be accurately interpreted by another and integrated into patients’ digital health records, including those available through the updated Aarogya Setu application.
The new standards are expected to deliver benefits across the healthcare ecosystem. Hospitals and diagnostic centres can minimise duplicate investigations when patients seek treatment at multiple facilities, reducing costs and improving continuity of care. Insurance providers will be able to use structured clinical data through the National Health Claims Exchange to automate claim verification, potentially reducing approval timelines from several days to just minutes. For electronic medical record (EMR) companies and digital health technology providers, integrating BHTS and CLCI is expected to become an essential requirement for compatibility with ABDM-enabled systems.
The initiative also supports the newly launched National Drug Registry, which has assigned unique digital identifiers to over 1.23 lakh medicines. This is expected to improve prescription accuracy and reduce medication errors caused by drugs with similar names.
India’s digital health ecosystem has already crossed 90 crore ABHA accounts and 100 crore linked health records, making it one of the world’s largest digital health identity networks. However, the rapid growth of digital records has highlighted the need for a common semantic framework to ensure information is not only stored digitally but can also be exchanged and understood consistently across healthcare systems.
The long-term success of BHTS and CLCI will depend largely on their adoption by state governments, hospitals, laboratories and private healthcare software vendors. While the technical infrastructure is now in place, widespread implementation across existing health information systems will be essential to realise the full benefits of interoperability.
As India advances towards AI-driven healthcare, clinical decision support systems and data-based public health surveillance, establishing a standardised medical terminology framework represents a critical step in creating a truly connected and interoperable digital healthcare ecosystem.