‘Indian healthcare needs immediate intervention’

Immediate interventions are needed to enable higher vaccine production and distribution. Physical supply chain and inventory management needs to be enhanced, particularly in the rural areas.

Hyderabad: Indian healthcare sector has faced tremendous pressure due to the pandemic. It is high time the country strengthens its primary healthcare system and takes a series of measures in the next 1-2 years to build capabilities, says an expert.

Immediate interventions are needed to enable higher vaccine production and distribution. Physical supply chain and inventory management needs to be enhanced, particularly in the rural areas. There should be multi-stakeholder information exchange and the workforce should be trained if the required skill sets are lacking. Quarantine centres need to be created across India as Covid is going to stay for a long time.

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Dr Tapan Panda, director, NMIMS Hyderabad, told Telangana Today, “What we are seeing in the Indian healthcare sector is not the cause. It is an outcome of what has happened in the past. India over the several decades has not invested adequately into the primary healthcare system. The primary health centres (PHCs) have poor infrastructure. Through the reference system, patients had been referred to secondary and tertiary hospitals for further course of treatment. After the pandemic outbreak, the country lacked scalable systems in terms of healthcare services, supply chain management, and IT investment in healthcare.”

Panda added, “We still have to use technologies such as blockchain in the healthcare sector effectively. We have to shift from using ‘internet for information’ to ‘internet for creating value’. Incentive of the healthcare system should be patients, which is not the case today. Distribution of power is also key in handling situations such as the pandemic. What India is facing is not a problem caused by any other country, but it’s a systemic problem.”

Bringing synergies

On the need for collaborations in the healthcare and life science sectors, he said, monopoly in vaccine production will dictate prices. There should be ‘coopetition’ to make vaccines accessible and affordable to all. Collaborations need to happen across governments and companies.

NMIMS Hyderabad recently signed an MoU with the Consortium of Accredited Healthcare Organisations to establish a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to foster collaborative excellence in research and capacity building initiatives in the areas of pharmaceutical science and healthcare management.

Panda said, “We have got good response from the industry in Telangana for the new CoE. We want to improve the efficiency and services of healthcare institutions. We will create benchmarks and self-auditing quality tools for hospitals. We are also going to evaluate the knowledge gap in the healthcare industry and disseminate knowledge on quality management aspects in hospitals. We will train frontline workers in the healthcare industry.”

In the past, NMIMS Hyderabad has partnered with T-Hub to create incubation managers for the future. It has also tied up with Ftcci to carry out studies on the performance of administrative officials, create a matrix and rate them. Three areas of focus- citizens, litigants and SMEs have been identified under the initiative termed ‘Voice’.

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