The NABH Digital Health Standards (DHS) for Hospitals are a graded accreditation of how well a hospital uses digital systems for patient care and administration, awarded at three levels — Silver, Gold and Platinum. The 2nd edition, published in September 2025, has 8 chapters, 38 standards and 182 objective elements, each graded Core, Commitment, Achievement or Excellence. Silver needs all Core elements and 60% of Commitment elements; Gold adds 60% of Achievement; Platinum adds 60% of Excellence. Accreditation lasts four years with a surveillance assessment at 24 months, and annual fees range from ₹20,000 to ₹1,25,000 by bed count and level. It is separate from NABH's certification of HIS and EMR software products.
This guide is for hospital CEOs, medical directors, quality managers and IT heads deciding whether to apply and at what level. It covers the structure, scoring, eligibility, fees and process, what the standards demand from hospital software, and how many hospitals have been accredited so far. It was checked against NABH's documents on 5 November 2026.
Key takeaways
- Graded, not pass/fail. A hospital chooses Silver, Gold or Platinum based on its self-assessment, and only that level's objective elements are assessed.
- 17 Core elements are non-negotiable at every level — among them UHID generation, linking records to the UHID, unique sample identification, an IT policy, power backup, antivirus, user-credential management and a predefined tariff.
- Fees fell in 2025. Since 1 March 2025, the annual fee depends on bed count, starting at ₹20,000 a year for Silver in hospitals up to 50 beds, compared with a flat ₹1 lakh before.
- No prior NABH accreditation needed to apply — any provider with an IPD or day-care setup is eligible — but a DHS-accredited hospital must apply for NABH hospital accreditation in its third year unless it already holds it.
- About 160 hospitals held DHS accreditation by early 2026 according to an ISB white paper: 77 Silver, 40 Gold and 43 Platinum.
What are the NABH Digital Health Standards?
NABH, the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers under the Quality Council of India, released the first edition of the Digital Health Standards on 17 September 2023 and launched the Digital Health Accreditation Programme on 5 October 2023. At launch it was open only to hospitals already accredited by NABH, and the first 100 hospitals to qualify received a 50% subsidy on fees for two years. NABH announced the 100th certification in September 2024.
A draft 2nd edition was released for public comment in August 2025, and NABH now publishes the "2nd Edition, September 2025" standard as the current text on its programme page. NABH training calendars list implementation programmes for the 2nd edition, including one on 21–22 November 2026. We found no separate NABH notice giving a formal effective date or transition rule for hospitals accredited under the 1st edition, so hospitals renewing should confirm the edition with NABH.
The structure of the 2nd edition
Three clinical and five non-clinical chapters, 38 standards and 182 objective elements (OEs):
| Chapter | Standards | OEs | Core | Commitment | Achievement | Excellence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAC — Access, Assessment and Continuity of Care | 8 | 40 | 3 | 17 | 13 | 7 |
| COP — Care of Patients | 9 | 41 | 0 | 8 | 19 | 14 |
| MOM — Management of Medication | 4 | 13 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 2 |
| DIS — Digital Infrastructure | 2 | 14 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 5 |
| DOM — Digital Operations Management | 6 | 25 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 7 |
| FPM — Finance and Procurement Management | 3 | 17 | 3 | 9 | 1 | 4 |
| HRM — Human Resource Management | 4 | 14 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 8 |
| IMS — Information Management System | 2 | 18 | 1 | 9 | 0 | 8 |
| Total | 38 | 182 | 17 | 57 | 53 | 55 |
The chapter skeleton and OE codes are unchanged from the 1st edition. The 2nd edition's summary of changes lists 32 re-gradings and clarifications — for example, the IT policy review (DOM.1.b) and IT budget (IMS.2.e) became Core, while some medication and clinical elements moved between Commitment and Achievement.
What Silver, Gold and Platinum require
| Level | At first accreditation | At the 24-month surveillance |
|---|---|---|
| Silver | 100% of Core + 60% of Commitment | 100% of Core + 80% of Commitment |
| Gold | Silver + 60% of Achievement | Silver + 80% of Achievement |
| Platinum | Gold + 60% of Excellence | Gold + 80% of Excellence |
Each OE is scored 0, 5 or 10; elements that do not apply are excluded; and the percentage is worked out separately for each category. A hospital does not have to pass through Silver to apply for Gold or Platinum.
Eligibility, process and validity
- Who can apply: any healthcare provider with an IPD or day-care setup — allopathic multi- and single-specialty hospitals, day-care centres, eye, dental and AYUSH hospitals. There is no minimum bed count.
- The NABH condition: a DHS-accredited provider must apply for NABH hospital (or relevant) accreditation in the third year of its DHS validity unless it already holds one.
- Process: gap analysis with NABH's self-assessment toolkit → register on the NABH portal → upload information and documents → pay fees → final assessment on site or virtually by trained digital assessors → close non-conformities within 90 days → Digital Accreditation Committee decision.
- Validity: four years, with a surveillance assessment at 24 months.
Fees (from 1 March 2025)
NABH's notification of 12 February 2025, still on the programme page in November 2026. Annual fees are per year; add 18% GST.
| Beds | Application fee | Silver (annual) | Gold (annual) | Platinum (annual) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 50 | ₹10,000 | ₹20,000 | ₹30,000 | ₹37,500 |
| 51–100 | ₹20,000 | ₹20,000 | ₹35,000 | ₹50,000 |
| 101–300 | ₹20,000 | ₹35,000 | ₹50,000 | ₹75,000 |
| 301–500 | ₹30,000 | ₹50,000 | ₹75,000 | ₹1,00,000 |
| Above 500 | ₹30,000 | ₹50,000 | ₹90,000 | ₹1,25,000 |
The certification route for entry-level hospitals
From 1 April 2025, hospitals holding NABH Entry-Level certification can take a Digital Health Certification at Silver level only (Core and Commitment elements), valid for two years without surveillance. The application fee is waived and the annual fee is ₹10,000 up to 20 beds, ₹20,000 for 21–100 beds, ₹35,000 for 101–300 and ₹50,000 above 300, plus GST. After two years at Silver, a hospital can move up to Gold or Platinum accreditation.
What the standards ask of your hospital software
Many objective elements describe what the hospital's systems must do. A selection, with each element's category:
- Registration and records: UHID generation (Core); all records linked to the UHID (Core); duplicate-patient detection (Commitment); ABHA creation or capture (Achievement).
- Laboratory and imaging: a unique sample ID traceable to the patient (Core); sample movement tracking with TAT (Commitment); OPD patients able to access lab reports digitally (Commitment); analyser-to-LIMS result transfer (Excellence); lab reports linked to ABHA (Excellence); DICOM for imaging (Commitment).
- Clinical care: digital prescriptions (Commitment); digital signatures (Achievement); computerised orders for lab, radiology and medicines (Achievement); patient access to prescriptions (Achievement); records linked to and fetched through ABHA (Excellence); clinical decision support (Excellence).
- Medication: a digital formulary, dispensing records, expired-drug alerts, and returns and recalls (Commitment); a drug-administration record (Achievement); bedside patient verification before administration (Excellence); location-wise emergency drug lists (Core).
- Security and operations: an IT policy reviewed periodically (Core); power backup and antivirus (Core); user-credential management and restriction of data transfer to external devices (Core); continuous software updates and support (Core); digital archive and retrieval (Core); firewall, automatic session logout and disaster-recovery plans (Commitment); encryption and an audit trail of every transaction (Achievement); two-factor authentication, single sign-on and cloud hosting (Excellence).
- Finance and registries: digital patient payments and a predefined tariff (Core); an insurance claims module (Commitment); claims through NHCX (Excellence); HFR and HPR registration (Excellence).
- Information management: standardised documents with mandatory fields and templates; consent management and patient data-correction requests (Excellence); a designated IT team (Commitment); a data protection officer (Excellence).
Several of these are hospital processes rather than software features — the IT policy, budget, disaster-recovery plan, IT team and training. Training was the most common challenge reported by hospitals in the ISB study.
NABH certification of HIS and EMR software
NABH runs a separate programme that certifies software products, not hospitals: the Digital Health Standards for HIS/EMR Systems, launched on 17 September 2024. Software is certified at Basic or Advanced level for two years after evaluation and testing by NABH-approved testing agencies. Vendors must have at least three deployments in operating Indian hospitals, a valid ABDM Milestone 3 certificate and a web application security audit. Fees for two years range from ₹50,000 (Basic, HIS or EMR) to ₹1,50,000 (Advanced, HIS and EMR), plus GST. NABH's list showed 32 certified listings on 5 November 2026. In the hospital standard, we found no objective element that requires the hospital's software to hold this certification; the hospital is assessed on how it uses its systems.
How many hospitals are accredited, and does it pay?
NABH had certified 100 hospitals by September 2024. A white paper by the Indian School of Business and the Max Institute of Healthcare Management, released in August 2026, counted 160 hospitals with DHS accreditation — 77 Silver, 40 Gold and 43 Platinum — and reported, from a study of 20 hospitals, digital maturity rising from 3.42 to 4.35 on a five-point scale after accreditation, with staff training and behaviour change the most cited difficulty. There is no DHS-specific payment uplift from PM-JAY, CGHS or insurers yet; PM-JAY's higher package rates are linked to NABH clinical accreditation, not digital accreditation.
Getting ready: a practical sequence
- Download the 2nd edition and NABH's self-assessment toolkit; score every OE honestly.
- Close the 17 Core elements first — most are UHID, sample ID, IT policy, power backup, antivirus, credentials, archive and tariff.
- Pick the level your systems already support; Silver at first application and Gold at renewal is a common path.
- Get ABDM in place: ABHA at registration, records linked, HFR and HPR complete — see the ABDM compliance checklist.
- Write the IT policy, disaster-recovery plan and access-control procedures, and train every department on its screens.
- Collect evidence: screenshots, audit-trail extracts, backup logs, training records.
How Healthixio maps to the standards
Healthixio is cloud-based hospital management software covering many of the system-side elements out of the box:
- Registration: a UHID on every patient with a configurable format, every OPD, IPD, lab, pharmacy and billing record linked to it, and ABHA creation by Aadhaar OTP or fingerprint at the desk.
- Clinical: digital OPD prescriptions from templates; lab and radiology orders flowing to the pathology queue and radiology worklist; IPD Patient File charts; ward medicine schedules sent to the pharmacy.
- Laboratory and reports: each lab order carries an ID and barcode; reports go to patients on WhatsApp and the patient portal with a QR code to verify them, and are linked to ABHA.
- Medication: item master with schedules, batch- and expiry-wise stock with expired and expiring filters, dispensing bills, and purchase and sale returns.
- ABDM: certified by the National Health Authority for Milestones M1–M3 — records linked to ABHA and fetched with the patient's consent — using the hospital's HFR ID.
- Security and finance: named logins with role-based permissions, an audit log of every action, daily automated off-site backups, predefined service tariffs and packages, and a TPA and insurance module.
DICOM imaging, bedside barcode medication verification and clinical decision support are not part of Healthixio today. See the security and admin control module, the ABDM integration page and our guide to audit logs and role-based access.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is NABH digital health accreditation?
It is NABH's graded accreditation of a hospital's digital maturity under the Digital Health Standards for Hospitals, at Silver, Gold or Platinum level, valid for four years with a surveillance assessment at 24 months.
What changed in the 2nd edition?
The 2nd edition (September 2025) keeps the 8 chapters, 38 standards and 182 objective elements, and re-grades or clarifies 32 elements — for example, the IT policy review and IT budget became Core.
What percentage is needed for Silver, Gold and Platinum?
Silver needs 100% of Core and 60% of Commitment elements; Gold adds 60% of Achievement; Platinum adds 60% of Excellence. At the 24-month surveillance the Commitment, Achievement and Excellence thresholds rise to 80%.
Does a hospital need NABH accreditation first?
No. Any provider with an IPD or day-care setup can apply. But a DHS-accredited provider must apply for NABH hospital accreditation in the third year unless already accredited. NABH Entry-Level hospitals can take the cheaper Silver-only certification.
How much does NABH digital health accreditation cost?
Since 1 March 2025: an application fee of ₹10,000–₹30,000 and an annual fee from ₹20,000 (Silver, up to 50 beds) to ₹1,25,000 (Platinum, above 500 beds), plus 18% GST and assessment costs.
How many hospitals have NABH digital health accreditation?
About 160 by early 2026 according to the ISB white paper — 77 Silver, 40 Gold and 43 Platinum. NABH announced its first 100 in September 2024.
Does our HMS have to be NABH-certified for us to get DHS accreditation?
We found no objective element in the hospital standard that requires NABH-certified software; the hospital is assessed on what its systems do and how staff use them. NABH's HIS/EMR certification is a separate programme for vendors.
Is ABDM integration required?
ABHA capture is an Achievement element, and linking and fetching records through ABHA and HFR/HPR registration are Excellence elements. They are not needed for Silver, but they are needed for higher scores.
Plan your digital accreditation
Most of the Core and Commitment elements are about doing ordinary hospital work on one system. Talk to us about a gap review against the standard, or see the screens on the product tour.
Sources
- NABH Digital Health Standards for Hospitals, 2nd Edition, September 2025: NABH
- NABH Digital Health Accreditation Programme page: nabh.co
- NABH fee revision notification, 12 February 2025: NABH
- NABH Digital Health Certification Programme, 12 February 2025: NABH
- NABH Digital Health Standards for HIS/EMR Systems: nabh.co
- ISB and MIHM white paper on post-adoption value of the NABH Digital Health Standards: isb.edu
Last reviewed 5 November 2026. Confirm the edition and fees with NABH before you apply.