India Pharma Outlook Team | Tuesday, 27 October 2026
Ayushman Bharat data is gaining importance as a potential resource for pharmaceutical research, real-world evidence and drug safety monitoring in India.
NITI Aayog member Dr. M. Srinivas has highlighted Ayushman Bharat data as a potentially valuable resource for pharmaceutical research in India, with relevance for the wider Global South
The growing digital health ecosystem could offer new opportunities to understand disease patterns, treatment outcomes and patient needs across diverse populations.
For pharmaceutical companies, the potential extends beyond healthcare digitization to real-world evidence, post-approval studies and drug safety monitoring.
However, translating extensive health records into credible research evidence will depend on data quality, interoperability, patient consent and appropriate access to records for scientific and clinical investigations.
The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is building an interoperable digital health ecosystem that allows medical records to be shared between participating healthcare providers with patient consent.
In July 2026, the government reported more than 94 crore Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) numbers and over 100 crore linked health records.
For the pharmaceutical industry, real-world evidence in India could help researchers understand how medicines perform outside controlled clinical trials.
When suitable longitudinal records are available, researchers may be able to investigate treatment effectiveness across different patient populations, examine patterns of medicine use and identify outcomes that warrant further clinical study.
It may also support post-approval studies, particularly when researchers need to investigate how treatments perform across different healthcare settings.
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Drug safety monitoring is another potential application. Pharmaceutical companies and researchers use pharmacovigilance systems to identify, assess and prevent adverse drug reactions.
Ayushman Bharat data could potentially complement existing adverse drug reaction reporting systems by helping researchers identify signals that merit further investigation.
For example, linked records might help generate research questions about complications following treatment or differences in outcomes among patient groups.
However, electronic health records alone cannot establish that a medicine caused a particular adverse event. Researchers must account for underlying illnesses, concurrent medicines, incomplete documentation and other potential explanations.
Data access and governance will determine whether this potential becomes practical. ABDM follows a federated architecture in which health records remain with their respective custodians rather than being collected in one central repository.
Its health-data framework requires consent for sharing records, including with pharmaceutical companies. Consequently, the expansion of digital health records does not automatically provide drug manufacturers with access to patient-level information.
Research use would require appropriate permissions, privacy safeguards, suitable data-sharing arrangements and compliance with applicable requirements.
Data quality presents another challenge. Inconsistent diagnostic coding, missing treatment details and fragmented records can limit the reliability of real-world evidence.
Interoperability and standardized medical terminology are therefore essential if researchers are to compare outcomes across hospitals and patient populations.
For Indian pharmaceutical companies, the next step is to establish whether research-ready datasets can be accessed lawfully and used to answer defined scientific questions.
If these conditions are met, Ayushman Bharat's digital infrastructure could support more representative evidence on medicine effectiveness, post-approval outcomes and drug safety.
Its value to pharmaceutical research will ultimately depend not on the number of records created, but on the quality of the evidence those records can support.
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