HPR — the Healthcare Professionals Registry
India's verified directory of who is licensed to deliver care — the registry that lets a prescription, a teleconsult or a signed report be traced to a real, qualified human.
In one line
The Healthcare Professionals Registry (HPR) is ABDM's verified directory of who is qualified to deliver care in India — doctors, nurses, allied professionals and AYUSH practitioners — so that a prescription, a teleconsultation or a signed report can be traced to a real, licensed human being.
The problem it exists to solve
The HFR answers where. The HPR answers who — and who turns out to be the harder question, because clinical authority is personal. A hospital does not prescribe; a clinician does. So the moment care goes digital and remote, an old assumption quietly breaks.
In a physical clinic, verification is ambient: the degree is on the wall, the staff know the doctor, the patient walked in. Move that same consultation to a phone screen through eSanjeevani or a UHI app, and every one of those cues disappears. All that's left is a name on a screen. Without a registry, there is no difference between a physician and a convincing stranger — and that gap is exactly where impersonation lives.
The HPR closes it: a professional is verified once against their council registration, and thereafter the network can answer is this person who they claim to be, and are they still licensed to do this?
Deliberately wider than "doctors"
As with the facility registry, the scope is broad on purpose:
- Doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and AYUSH practitioners — the registry covers the actual clinical workforce, not one prestigious slice of it.
- India's nursing workforce alone runs into the millions, and nurses are the professionals most patients actually encounter most often. A registry that skipped them would be modelling a fantasy version of Indian healthcare.
As of 2026 the HPR holds more than five lakh enrolled professionals — real, but a fraction of the total workforce, which is worth keeping in mind before you treat registry presence as universal.
Where it shows up in a build
- A professional enrols and receives their HPR ID.
- That ID is what a teleconsultation platform checks before letting someone practise on it.
- In FHIR terms it's the
PractitioneryourEncounter,MedicationRequestorDiagnosticReportreferences — profiled per NRCeS. - Paired with the HFR's
Organization, it gives you aPractitionerRole: this clinician, at this facility, in this capacity.
The honest caveats
Two things are worth saying plainly, because they're where registries get oversold:
Enrolment is not competence. The HPR verifies that a licence exists. It does not assess whether the care given was good. It's an identity and eligibility check — a floor, not a ceiling.
A registry is a living claim, not a fact. Licences lapse, get suspended, get restored; professionals change specialty and employer. The value of the HPR is entirely a function of how faithfully it tracks those changes. A verified ID that stopped being true in 2024 is worse than no ID at all, because it carries unearned confidence. When you build against it, check status at the time of the encounter — don't cache it and assume.