Dr. Malhotra runs a 70-bed multi-specialty hospital in Nagpur, and until earlier this year he had one word for the accreditation certificate on his lobby wall: closed. His hospital cleared its National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers (NABH) accreditation in 2019 and renewed it on schedule since. He considered the subject settled. Then a hospital administrators’ group he’s part of started discussing a topic he had never heard: NABH’s Digital Health Standards for Hospitals. Eight chapters. 182 assessable elements. Three maturity tiers — Silver, Gold, Platinum — that didn’t exist in any accreditation cycle he’d been through. His first question was practical: is this optional? His second question was more useful, and one he hadn’t thought to ask: why did NABH build this now?

That second question is the one worth answering.

Read the standard yourself. NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals is available in full, free, at nabh.co/digital-health-standards — creating a free NABH account is required to access it. Nothing in this piece substitutes for the source document itself.

What NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals Actually Is

NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals is a dedicated accreditation and certification framework, separate from general hospital accreditation and from NABH’s other digital-health programmes (such as its certification track for HIS/EMR vendors), that assesses a hospital’s digital systems across eight chapters and 182 Objective Elements, awarding one of three maturity tiers: Silver, Gold, or Platinum.

• Three of the eight chapters are clinical: Access, Assessment and Continuity of Care (AAC); Care of Patients (COP); and Management of Medication (MOM).
• Five are non-clinical: Digital Infrastructure, Digital Operations Management, Finance and Procurement Management, Human Resource Management, and Information Management System.
• Of the 182 Objective Elements, only 17 are Core and mandatorily assessed at every cycle — the remaining 165 are graded across Commitment, Achievement, and Excellence bands, letting a hospital build digital maturity in stages instead of all at once.

This means a mid-tier hospital does not need to solve for Platinum on day one. The standard is built as a staged climb, not a pass/fail gate.

Why NABH Digital Accreditation Exists Now

NABH built a dedicated digital standard because accreditation bodies everywhere are responding to the same pressure: healthcare delivery is digitizing, and a body that certifies quality of care cannot credibly stay silent on the systems that increasingly deliver that care.

The pattern is visible outside India too. In the UK, the NHS gates any digital health technology entering the system through the Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC) — assessed across clinical safety, data protection, technical assurance, interoperability, and usability — before a product is procured or deployed. In Germany, the medical device regulator BfArM runs a fast-track pathway (DiGA) that lets doctors prescribe approved digital health apps reimbursed by statutory insurance; the number of listed apps grew from 24 to 68 between 2021 and 2024 because the state built a defined pathway rather than leaving adoption to chance.

Globally, HIMSS EMRAM — an eight-stage (0–7) maturity model for electronic medical record adoption — is used by more than 9,000 hospitals worldwide as an external benchmark, the same underlying logic NABH’s Silver/Gold/Platinum tiers apply domestically, tied to accreditation instead of an industry body. None of these three mechanisms look alike — one gates procurement, one pays for outcomes, one benchmarks maturity. But each is a regulator or industry body building structure around a shift that was already underway. NABH’s Digital Health Standard is India’s version of the same instinct.

The Domestic Case for ABDM NABH Compliance

NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals does not exist in isolation. It lines up with three domestic developments a hospital operator already has to navigate: the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), government e-governance health platforms, and the DPDP Act.

ABDM is building the infrastructure for a patient to hold a portable health record — an ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account) number, linked to a Healthcare Professionals Registry and a Health Facility Registry — in roughly the way UPI built a shared interface for payments.

Government platforms like e-Hospital and e-Sanjeevani are already running hospital information systems and telemedicine services at national scale, integrated with ABDM.

The DPDP Act sets the legal boundary for how a hospital may collect, store, and process patient data digitally — a boundary that gets stricter, not looser, as more of a hospital’s operations move onto digital systems.

A hospital that treats these three developments as unrelated to its NABH renewal is missing the point. NABH’s Digital Health Standard functions as an accreditation-linked checklist for meeting all three at once, rather than a fourth, unrelated obligation.

What the September 2025 Edition Actually Changed

This is the 2nd Edition of NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals, dated September 2025 — the version currently in force, and the one referenced throughout this piece.

The edition trimmed its Objective Elements to 182, reduced its chapter count to eight, and introduced the Silver/Gold/Platinum maturity award — a structural shift from a pass/fail accreditation to a graded one.

Practically, this means a hospital no longer needs to hit every standard at once to receive recognised progress, and can plan a multi-year digital maturity path instead of a single all-or-nothing assessment cycle.

Any hospital owner referencing an older summary, a vendor pitch deck, or a consultant’s explainer should confirm it describes this September 2025 edition specifically — the maturity tiers and staged Objective Elements are recent enough that older material is unlikely to reflect them.

The Strategic Case — A Forcing Function, Not a Certificate

The value of NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals is not the wall plaque for an independent hospital. It is the forcing function of a structured deadline for work that would otherwise stay a permanent “someday” item on the IT budget.

Digital accreditation rewards the same instinct this comes down to elsewhere in a hospital’s operations: understanding why a system works at a structural level, not just running it day to day. A hospital that begins its Core Objective Elements now, under the Silver tier, builds the systems and habits that make Gold and Platinum incremental rather than overwhelming — the difference between driving a system and understanding why it’s engineered the way it is.

Read this way, pursuing the standard early is cheaper than catching up under pressure later — particularly once empanelment criteria or payer requirements start referencing digital maturity tiers, which is a plausible next step given how directly accreditation and quality strategy already shape operational excellence for Indian hospitals.

FAQ

Is NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals mandatory for hospital accreditation?

No. As of the September 2025 edition, Digital Health accreditation and certification are separate programmes from general hospital accreditation, and a hospital can pursue one without the other. However, 17 of the 182 Objective Elements are Core and mandatorily assessed whenever a hospital opts into the digital programme, and empanelment criteria tied to ABDM compliance are likely to reference digital maturity over time.

What is the difference between NABH accreditation and NABH certification for digital health?

Accreditation is an ongoing, cyclical evaluation of a hospital’s systems against a standard, with surveillance and renewal built in. Certification is typically a one-time validation at a point in time, often used as a stepping stone toward accreditation for hospitals or vendors — including HIS/EMR vendors — not yet ready for the full accreditation cycle.

What are the Silver, Gold, and Platinum tiers in NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals?

They are maturity tiers introduced in the 2nd Edition (September 2025) that give a hospital graded recognition for digital maturity — Silver for foundational compliance, working up to Platinum for the highest level of digital sophistication — rather than a single pass/fail accreditation outcome.

The Decision

Dr. Malhotra’s real question was never whether the standard was optional this year. It’s whether his hospital becomes the one that started building its Core Objective Elements in 2026, or the one still asking whether NABH’s digital health standard is mandatory once payers start asking for a maturity tier by name.

Next: how to actually read NABH’s Digital Health Standard for Hospitals chapter by chapter.