Title: Low Cost Health Care Delivery Models in India

Biography:

Ms. Sonymol K has achieved university first rank and awarded gold medal during her graduation and specialized in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in master’s degree. She completed post graduate diploma in Hospital management, currently she is a research scholar at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi (PhD in Operations Management).Professionally she holds 20 years of experience in healthcare in nursing administration, quality, nursing education and strategy. Presently associated with Continental hospitals Hyderabad as General manager – Nursing. She is empaneled for National accreditation Board for hospitals and health care providers (NABH) as an assessor, conducted assessments of almost 50 hospitals across India in various programs. She also awarded with nursing excellence by AHPI in 2015 and 2019, BW business world health care award, FICCI health care award for patient safety, IHH quality international award from Malaysia, and Health care innovation award in 2019 September

Abstract

India is a developing country; the needs of meeting health care demands is a challenge that India is currently facing.  Healthcare is a social responsibility, that every country must take consideration in their political agenda, give economical priority during budget allocation. Some of the innovative models are: 1)PPP model: Public private partnership is one of the health care delivery models in which we can offer health care to the rural public. There are three categories of partnership in this model. Firstly, Infrastructure model, Secondly Clinical model and third version is integrated model, in which both infrastructure and clinical care can be taken care by private hospitals. 2) Hub and Spoke design: In this model, one hub can have several spoke centers that caters the needs of the rural population. Through this model, the tertiary private hospitals can provide service to the rural areas, where accessibility, availability and affordability becomes a challenge. 3) Task shifting: This is a model in which the business strategy becomes volume based than margin based. For e.g.: A doctor who performs surgery can devote his time and plan his tasks only on the clinical aspects (surgery) without wasting time and energy for non-clinical tasks. 4) Out sourcing models: Non-clinical services like security, housekeeping, Food and Beverage, Drivers are outsourced/contracted. This in turn helps in increasing the focus on clinical service staff and reduction of capital budget expenditure. 5) Telemedicine/Telenursing: This has increased the accessibility of healthcare to the customers at the finger tips by saving the energy and time in visiting the doctors at their office. Renting-out of medical equipment: Few hospitals whose capital investment is less, are adopting the strategy of renting the costly equipment like X-ray machine, CT machine, MRI machine etc. 6) Adoption of public hospitals by Private hospitals: In this model, tertiary private hospitals are adopting local public hospitals in which they are providing healthcare services to the rural public with minimal cost. The penetration of healthcare insurance is very minimal in India. After the implementation of the governmental policy (Ayushmaan Bharath) the healthcare becomes more accessible and affordable to the rural public and this enhances the technological leverage in healthcare as well.