Step 1 — Find the facility
The patient picks the hospital, clinic or lab they visited. Providers are ABDM-registered facilities identified byhip_id.
Providers overview →
Step 2 — Discover unlinked care contexts
Send the patient’s verified identifiers to the chosen facility. The facility matches them against its own records and returns the care contexts (visits, prescriptions, lab reports) that are not yet linked.Step 3 — Link with OTP
The patient selects which care contexts to claim. The facility sends an OTP to their registered mobile; confirming it completes the link.
Care Context Discovery — full flow →
The other direction: HIP-initiated linking
A facility can also link records to the patient’s ABHA address on its own, without the patient discovering anything. The patient then sees an authorization request in their inbox.
Patient Requests overview →
If your PHR app also runs facility software (you are a HIP too), the HIP-side APIs are a separate set: Care Context Link, On Discover, On Link Init, On Link Confirm, and Notify unlinked care contexts.
Stay linked: subscriptions
Discovery is a one-time pull. To keep receiving new records automatically, the PHR app holds a subscription on the patient’s ABHA address — once granted, every new care context linked by any HIP notifies your cloud.abha.subscription_notify tells you a record exists — it does not deliver it. To read the document, raise a consent request with Create Consent, or rely on an auto-approval policy so it happens without prompting the patient. See Consents & Subscriptions.