By Prathiba Raju and Abhijeet Singh
New Delhi: Whenever people discuss healthcare in India the argument often circles back to core issues that is the accessibility and affordability of such efforts, but for society like ours, where the socio-economic stratification dictates the access to medical interventions confronting such issues is both inevitable and indispensable.
Pioneering in this regard ETHealthworld at its annual flagship event the fourth edition of Healthcare Leaders Summit convened inaugural panel discussion on ‘Promoting Inclusivity in Healthcare: Addressing Disparities and Access Barriers.’ The power-packed panelists for the session included Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Former Chief Scientist, WHO & Chairperson, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation; Rajiv Nath, Managing Director, Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd; Vishal Bali, Executive Chairman, Asia Holdings; Annapurna Das, General Manager, Takeda Biopharmaceuticals India and the session was moderated by Vikas Dandekar, Editor, ETHealthworld.
Through a video message, the former Chief Scientist of World Health Organisation (WHO) stressed that, “Pandemic-like phenomena are likely to happen more frequently in the future and the shocks we are experiencing because of climate change are impacting our health both directly and indirectly.”
“It is very important to make equity the centre of the health system which will help to build a strong and resilient health system. Universal health coverage offers a promising solution in this regard by covering both the aspects i.e. delivery of services and financial protection (out of pocket expenditure),” she added.
In her address Dr Swaminathan also flagged that, “While there is no doubt that the private sector is delivering healthcare services to people in India but at the same time there has to be a balance and if it is pushing more and more people into poverty then it is not the desired end result. To ensure this we need a system which is governed and managed by the government.”
“The primary healthcare sector in India needs more investment considering that the majority of the services are delivered by the government as the private sector in India doesn’t play that bigger role in providing primary services,” she added.
Sharing his insights another panelist, Vishal Bali said, “With respect to healthcare in India there is a massive demand and supply gap and we need different approaches and models to fill this gap. If we provide an aggressive push to those models which hold the potential to scale fast then we can create an opportunity to fill this gap.”
“India is a country which is deficit in action across the entire healthcare ecosystem where it is the number of beds, professionals and given the massive prevalence of both communicable and non communicable diseases we (India) need to have a disease specific healthcare focus,” he added.
Participating in the discussion, Annapurna Das said, “Private players in India need an end to end scalable strategy where incorporating digital technology and blending onground models is required to expand the target group of patients and deliver accessible quality healthcare.
“These fundamental ways which are brick-and-mortar and digitally enabled will help to accelerate the access in private and public”, she added.
Covering the medical devices segment, Rajiv Nath shared, “Any entrepreneur (medical device maker) who sells the product finds that the system is against his/her low cost affordable ethical pricing. If the labeled price is too low then procurement heads of financially driven hospitals are not happy to buy the product because they don’t make money on it and as a result the product becomes a failure.
As a potential solution to this challenge, “MRP of medical devices needs to be rationalised by government regulations”, Nath suggested.
Adding to his remarks Vishal Bali said, “For country like India which has a highly import-driven healthcare ecosystem and a currency which keeps depreciating the cost of care is growing constantly and especially in the post COVID era if you look at the international technologies their pricing is moving up 30-35 per cent per annum. So ultimately the solution lies in India technology and Indian entrepreneurs who can help to overcome the issues of affordability and accessibility while providing quality products.”
Concluding the discussion Annapurna Das, said, “Affordable healthcare is fundamental in creating an inclusive ecosystem.. And to achieve so it requires a synergy between public and private healthcare players and there are some crucial products (drugs) which have a global manufacturing setup for which the private sector has to rely on import pathways. Therefore, it needs more enabling policies which assist them to bring access at the right price point for this country (India).”
