NDHM to ABDM: Understanding the Rebrand

If you’re new to India’s digital health stack, one of the first confusing things you’ll run into is that the same mission is referred to by two different names — NDHM and ABDM — often in the same document or codebase.

Same mission, two names

The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) was the original name used during the pilot phase. It was later folded under the Ayushman Bharat umbrella and renamed the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) for national rollout. The underlying architecture, registries, and FHIR-based interoperability approach carried over unchanged — this was a branding change, not a technical one.

Why both names still show up

Because the rename happened after the FHIR IG packages, domain names, and identifier systems were already published, a lot of infrastructure still carries the old ndhm name:

• IG package files are still commonly distributed as ndhm.tgz alongside newer abdm-*.tgz releases — same content, legacy filename.
• The NRCeS documentation site itself is hosted at nrces.in/**ndhm**/fhir/r4/.
• Older third-party tooling, blog posts, and even some current government subdomains still say NDHM.

Practical takeaway: when integrating with this ecosystem, treat “NDHM” and “ABDM” as interchangeable in code and documentation unless a source explicitly says otherwise — don’t assume a reference to one predates or excludes the other. This site’s validator accepts both ndhm and abdm as IG selections for exactly this reason.