HLL Lifecare has joined hands with Government of Maharashtra to begin a movement to drive preventive healthcare within the state by providing free diagnostic services at state-run health facilities
Diagnostics are an integral part of any healthcare system and provides information needed by service providers to make informed decisions about care provision related to prevention, detection, treatment and management. In India, out of pocket expenditures on diagnostic tests are high and rising, sometimes even more than the cost of medicines. The poor who access public healthcare facilities have limited access to diagnostic services.
Government of Maharashtra, in a path breaking initiative to reduce out-of-pocket expense in healthcare, is in the process of establishing around 100 diagnostic labs in 33 districts of the state to provide free laboratory tests to the public.
The state government has partnered with HLL Lifecare Ltd (HLL), a Government of India (GoI) enterprise under the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoH&FW) to implement this prestigious project.An agreement was recently signed between HLL and State Health Society, National Health Mission (NHM) and Director of Health Services (DHS), Mumbai, for providing laboratory services in the health facilities of the state.
As per the agreement, free laboratory testing services will be provided to the public in nearly 2,300 government hospital centres under DHS, more particularly at the level of Primary Healthcare Centre (PHC), child health centres, government hospitals, district hospitals and super speciality hospitals.
A package of essential diagnostic tests made free of cost at public health facilities across the state will not only reduce the burden on the poor but will also be accessible to all sections of the society.
HINDLABS Diagnostic Centres have already been rolled in eight districts of Maharashtra — Pune, Thane, Parli, Jalna, Nandurbar, Mumbai, Aurangabad and Nagpur and the project is being swiftly undertaken in all 33 districts simultaneously. It isexpected to cover the entire state by end of July 2017.
The main feature of the project is monitoring mechanism on a real time basis by IT-enabled systems which track the details of patients’ samples collected from the collection centre to the lab for testing and reporting. The latest module of Laboratory Information System (LIS) software will be used for the project to create an online dashboard to view the current status of sample collection, testing and reporting from all government hospital centres in Maharashtra.
The PHCs and rural hospitals have limited laboratory infrastructure for diagnostic tests. Once fully, operational, diagnostic tests will be made available to the public in the remotest villages of Maharashtra. The project is expected to bridge the availability gap by establishing laboratories near hospitals with all the divisions like haematology, pathology, biochemistry, immunoassay and microbiology.
The state government is providing high quality products and services at free of cost to the people of Maharashtra from all strata of the society. It has earned huge reputation in the country for bringing down the costs in the highly fragmented diagnostic services. HLL has always been the torchbearer for implementation of most of the prestigious government healthcare projects.
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