India provides healthcare in an affordable, efficient, and effective manner to its population of 1.4+ billion, a number that is nearly 5 times the size of the U.S.— the majority of which is not even located in large cities, says Forbes.
In 2018, India launched of “Ayushman Bharat,” the world’s largest free healthcare program aimed at providing best-in-class universal health coverage. The program has two main components:
1. Health and Wellness Centers (HWCs) that focus on the delivery of comprehensive primary and diagnostic care, and
2. Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (PM-JAY), a publicly financed health insurance plan for the socioeconomically underprivileged rural, as well as selected occupational categories of the urban population. It provides more than 550 million people with coverage of approximately $6,300 per family, per year, for secondary and tertiary care hospitalizations.
A significant facet of Ayushman Bharat its digital ecosystem that enables its functions. Known as The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), it “aims to develop the backbone necessary to support the integrated digital health infrastructure of the country.”
This system brings together healthcare technology companies, government regulators, and care delivery organizations with labs, pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers across multiple domains.
ABDM’s vision is “to create a national digital health ecosystem that supports universal health coverage in an efficient, accessible, inclusive, affordable, timely and safe manner, that provides a wide-range of data, information and infrastructure services, duly leveraging open, interoperable, standards-based digital systems, and ensures the security, confidentiality and privacy of health-related personal information.”
The digital architecture has been intricately designed to carefully link and maintain secure health records while also providing easy user interfaces to access care on a daily basis. In fact, the initiative has partnered some of the country’s largest organizations including Tata Medical and Diagnostics group, and Apollo Hospitals.
The ABDM ecosystem.
Source: National Health Authority of India. https://abdm.gov.in/abdm
One such program and application that has become immensely popular and widely used is eSanjeevani, the National Telemedicine Service of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare which has actually been recorded as the world’s largest telemedicine program.
The platform operates in two ways:
1) a provider-to-provider service that patients can use after walking into a health and wellness center or that physicians can use to request more specialized clinical advice from other physicians, and
2) eSanjeevani Out Patient Department (OPD), which directly connects a patient to a provider in the comfort of their own homes.
Since its inception in 2019, the program has “served more than 114 million patients at over 115,000 Health & Wellness Centers through 15,700+ hubs; and over 1,100 online OPDs serviced by more than 225,000 doctors, medical specialists, super-specialists and health workers as telemedicine practitioners.”
The Indian government’s efforts in undertaking such a large initiative must be commended. India is often compared to other Western nations with regards to its healthcare outcomes; however, very few other countries have to reconcile with the scope and scale of a population size similar to India, let alone take into consideration very nuanced cultural, demographic, economic, and social factors. Furthermore, even if compared on a one-to-one basis with consideration of population and demographic factors, healthcare outcomes in India still surpass those of many leading Western nations, especially when taking into account the cost-of-care with regards to the value provided to patients.
These efforts are certainly still a work in progress and there is still a lot of work to be done, but one thing is certain— India is slowly but surely succeeding in becoming a global beacon of ideal healthcare.
