Glossary of healthcare, AI, and platform terms.
22 definitions, each written to stand alone. Use this page as a reference when reading our security architecture, India-care pathway, or Healthcare Assistant documentation.
ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account)
A 14-digit health account number issued by India's Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM). Patients use it to consolidate medical records across hospitals, clinics, and labs in India. Health Hub supports optional ABHA linkage for Indian patients during registration.
ABDM (Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission)
India's national digital health programme that sets interoperability standards for electronic health records, health professional registries, and health facility registries. Health Hub integrates with ABDM for Indian patient identity, doctor verification (HPR), and record exchange.
Allergy gate
A rule-based engine that cross-checks every prescription against the patient's documented allergies and current medications in real time. If a conflict is detected, the prescription is blocked. If the gate service is unavailable, prescriptions are held, never released blindly. Overrides require a typed clinical reason and are immutably logged.
Care coordinator
A human staff member who manages the Africa-to-India referral journey for each patient, from first contact (within a 4-hour SLA) through hospital booking, travel, in-country support, and follow-up. Coordinators are platform employees accountable to Health Hub, not third-party agents.
DPDP Act 2023 (Digital Personal Data Protection Act)
India's federal data protection law enacted in 2023, defining how digital personal data may be collected, processed, transferred, and breached. Health Hub's region-split data residency design enforces DPDP requirements for Indian patient records stored in ap-south-1 (Mumbai).
Healthcare Assistant
A conversational intake system that conducts a structured 4-module clinical interview (chief complaint, duration and severity, medical history, and optional vitals) before every patient encounter on Health Hub. It classifies urgency, suggests ICD-10 codes, and runs a rule-based red-flag check. It never makes a diagnosis.
HIPAA
The US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which governs the privacy and security of protected health information. Health Hub is HIPAA-aligned and provides a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) on request for US enterprise customers.
HPR (Healthcare Professional Registry)
India's Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission registry of verified healthcare professionals. Health Hub verifies every Indian doctor against the HPR before activating their account, in addition to the NMC/NMR check.
ICD-10
The 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, published by the WHO. Health Hub's Healthcare Assistant suggests up to three candidate ICD-10 codes for every intake, which the consulting doctor confirms, edits, or replaces in the locked clinical note.
JCI accreditation
Joint Commission International, a US-based body that accredits hospitals worldwide against quality and patient-safety standards. Every Health Hub India-partner hospital is JCI- or NABH-accredited, contractually committed to patient SLAs, and transparent on pricing.
KMS (AWS Key Management Service)
An AWS service for creating and controlling cryptographic keys. Health Hub signs every JWT using a KMS-managed key, so signing keys never appear in environment variables, source code, or backups. This protects against credential-leak vectors that have led to compromises elsewhere.
M-Pesa
A mobile money service operated by Safaricom in Kenya (and partners in other African markets). Health Hub supports M-Pesa as a payment method for consultations, prescriptions, and diagnostics for Kenyan patients via the Daraja API.
NABH (National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers)
India's national accreditation body for hospitals. Equivalent in scope to JCI. Every Health Hub India-partner hospital is JCI- or NABH-accredited.
NMC / NMR
The National Medical Commission (NMC) is India's medical regulator; the National Medical Register (NMR) is its registry of licensed doctors. Health Hub verifies every Indian doctor's NMC/NMR number before activation. Doctors cannot conduct consultations until verification status is approved.
Red-flag detector
A deterministic, rule-based engine inside the Healthcare Assistant that flags emergency symptom patterns (e.g. chest pain with arm radiation, stroke signs, severe dyspnoea, major bleeding, loss of consciousness) and immediately escalates the case to a coordinator. The detector is never an LLM. Every rule was written by clinicians and is version-controlled.
Region-split data residency
Health Hub's architecture pattern by which African patient data is stored only in African data centres (AWS af-south-1, Cape Town) and Indian patient data is stored only in Indian data centres (AWS ap-south-1, Mumbai). Each JWT carries a region claim that gates every database call; cross-region access is rejected at the application layer unless explicit patient consent is on file.
SOAP notes
A clinical documentation format with four sections: Subjective (patient-reported symptoms), Objective (examination findings), Assessment (diagnosis), and Plan (treatment). Health Hub's doctor portal pre-populates the Subjective section from the Healthcare Assistant intake; doctors complete the rest and lock the record on consultation close.
SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service)
An AWS message-queue service. Health Hub uses SQS FIFO queues to route prescription orders to pharmacies and India referrals to the coordinator queue asynchronously, so a failure in a downstream service does not cascade and a single patient's events remain ordered.
Teleconsultation
A clinical consultation conducted over video, audio, or text between a patient and a licensed doctor. Health Hub teleconsults are powered by Agora SDK for video and audio, and Socket.IO for online chat with store-and-forward for offline messages.
Triage
The clinical process of prioritising patients by the urgency of their condition. Health Hub's Healthcare Assistant produces an urgency score from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest), calculated from severity, duration, trend, ICD-10 category, and risk factors. The score is used to order the doctor queue.
USSD
Unstructured Supplementary Service Data: a GSM protocol that works on any phone with cellular signal, including feature phones with no internet. Health Hub's USSD channel (*280#) runs the same Healthcare Assistant intake as the app, with state saved to Redis after every response so sessions survive disconnections.
WebRTC
Web Real-Time Communication, the open standard for browser-based video and audio. Health Hub teleconsults are built on WebRTC via Agora SDK, which provides global low-latency relays optimised for the variable network conditions of African and Indian users.