ABDM for diagnostic centres: ABHA, HFR, HPR and the incentive scheme

The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is the National Health Authority’s programme for linking every Indian’s health records to one identifier. For a laboratory or imaging centre it comes down to four actions: register the facility in the Health Facility Registry, register its doctors in the Healthcare Professionals Registry, create or verify an ABHA number for each patient at the front desk, and push each finished report to the patient’s ABHA as a structured FHIR record. Private centres are not required to do any of this. They are paid to: the Digital Health Incentive Scheme pays a facility ₹20 for every KYC-verified, ABHA-linked record above 100 in a month, and pays the software company that made the link ₹5.¹

This guide explains the registries, the three integration milestones, what the incentive is worth to a centre of a given size, the standards a report must meet, how consent works alongside the DPDP Act, and what a remote reporting partner such as Raydiac can and cannot do for you today.

The three registries

ABDM rests on three registries. ABHA identifies the patient, the HFR identifies the facility, and the HPR identifies the professional. A centre needs all three in place before a report can be linked.

The HPR is the one that touches remote reporting most directly. A radiologist applies at nhpr.abdm.gov.in and receives a 14-digit HPID. The profile is verified against medical council records, and published walk-throughs put the typical wait at three to five working days.²³ The National Health Authority’s own FAQ says employers and facilities can use the HPR for employment and credential verification.⁶ There is no documented public verification API for third parties, so treat the HPID as a useful second signal when credentialing a radiologist, not as a substitute for checking the Indian Medical Register. The NMC registration guide covers the primary check.

Milestones M1, M2 and M3

A software system is certified against ABDM in milestones. A diagnostic centre needs its software to have reached M2 before it can earn the record-linking incentive.⁴

M1 is a front-desk change. M2 is where the engineering sits: the centre’s reporting system, or its reporting partner’s system, must produce a valid FHIR bundle for each report and push it to the ABHA on the patient’s authentication. M3 is optional for a centre that only produces reports, but it is the milestone that would let a remote radiologist see a prior CT from another hospital.

The incentive scheme

The Digital Health Incentive Scheme (DHIS) is the money behind ABDM. The current published terms are in Corrigendum 6 of 20 November 2025, which extended the scheme from November 2025 to March 2026 “subject to availability of funds”.¹

A worked example

Take an imaging centre that produces 3,000 reports a month and links all of them. The first 100 do not count. The remaining 2,900 earn ₹20 each, which is ₹58,000 a month to the centre, and ₹14,500 a month to the digital solution company that pushed them.¹ That is real money for a tier-2 or tier-3 centre, which is why the scheme is worth understanding before you sign a software contract.

Standards: FHIR R4 and NRCES

A report pushed at M2 is not a PDF attached to an email. It is a FHIR R4 bundle that conforms to the National Resource Centre for EHR Standards (NRCES) implementation guide for ABDM. For an imaging report the relevant profile is DiagnosticReportImaging, which defines how the report, the imaging study reference, the performing practitioner and the patient are represented.⁵ The profile can carry the signed PDF as an attachment alongside the structured content, so the human-readable report the referrer already receives is preserved.

In practice this means the reporting system must know the patient’s ABHA, the facility’s HFR ID, the radiologist’s HPR ID and the study identifiers, and must assemble them into the bundle at signing. A structured report with separate findings, impression and recommendations maps more cleanly onto the profile than a block of free text; the radiology report format guide explains that structure.

Consent and the DPDP Act

ABDM is consent-driven. A record is linked to an ABHA only after the patient has authenticated, and any later sharing with another provider runs through the ABDM consent manager. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and the DPDP Rules 2025, notified on 14 November 2025, sit alongside this and do not replace it.⁸ The hospital or centre is the data fiduciary for the patient’s data; a reporting partner that pushes a record on the centre’s behalf is a processor acting under the centre’s instructions, and needs a processor contract that says so.

The practical consequences for a centre are: obtain and record the patient’s ABHA authentication at the front desk, keep the DPDP notice and consent flow separate from the ABDM one rather than assuming one covers the other, and make sure the reporting partner’s security safeguards meet what Rule 6 of the DPDP Rules will require when it takes effect. The DPDP Act guide for hospitals sets out those obligations and their dates.

How to get started

1. Register the facility in the Health Facility Registry and record the facility ID.
2. Ask every reporting doctor, including remote radiologists, to register in the HPR and give you their 14-digit HPID. Allow three to five working days.²
3. Add ABHA creation and verification to front-desk registration. This is milestone M1 and needs no reporting-system change beyond capturing the ABHA number.
4. Confirm which of your systems will act as the Health Information Provider at M2: your RIS, your reporting partner, or both. Only one needs to push each record.
5. Check that the M2 system is listed as a certified digital solution company, and that it has the ten-facility minimum the incentive scheme requires.
6. Agree in writing who receives the facility incentive and who receives the digital solution company incentive; they are paid to different entities.
7. Start counting. The first 100 transactions in each month do not earn, so a centre well below that volume should not expect meaningful payments.

What a reporting partner can and cannot do for you

A remote reporting partner can supply the report that gets linked, and can in principle act as the M2 Health Information Provider on the centre’s behalf, so that every signed CT or MRI report is pushed to the patient’s ABHA without the centre building the integration itself. It cannot register the facility in the HFR for you, cannot create the patient’s ABHA at your front desk, and cannot claim the facility incentive on your behalf.

Raydiac’s position is straightforward. ABDM M2 integration is on the roadmap and is not live. Today Raydiac delivers a signed report, with the radiologist’s name, qualification, registration number and council on it, as a PDF through the portal, by email and on WhatsApp, with a QR verification page. Because every report is already structured, signed and stored immutably, the M2 push is an output step on top of the existing pipeline rather than a redesign. Raydiac already asks radiologists for their HPID at onboarding as a second signal alongside Indian Medical Register verification. If you are choosing a reporting partner partly for ABDM, ask the direct question: is M2 certified and live, or planned? See how Raydiac works for hospitals for what is delivered today.

A centre that is still being set up should read the guide to starting a diagnostic imaging centre, which places ABDM alongside AERB, PC-PNDT and the other registrations in order.