India will need additional 3.5 million hospital beds, three million doctors and six million nurses by 2034

Adoption of telemedicine could transform India’s healthcare delivery and enable access to greater rural populations

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ recently launched report called ‘The Future of India: The Winning Leap’ identifies non-linear solutions which could save $ 90 bn in capital costs in India’s healthcare delivery infrastructure. Some of the non-linear solutions identified in the report are:

1. Build more with less – Improving healthcare infrastructure takes time and money. Low-cost operational models combined with innovative financing models could help secure the needed resources. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) present real possibilities. Through this financing model, the government provides land and financial subsidies to private operators, which build hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure. Specialty operational models also offer promise. In India, pioneers include Aravind Eye Care System and Narayana Health Group. These two hospitals invested in resources for specialised treatment (eye care and cardiac care respectively), which enabled them to streamline and standardise operations, making their services more affordable. High asset utilisation as well as para-skilling of nurses (training them to perform some procedures that previously only doctors could do) have reduced doctor time, further helping to lower costs and enabling the staff to serve larger volumes of patients.
2. Permanently lower costs – Improving health outcomes without having to build costly new infrastructure can also boost life expectancy at birth. Narayana Health Group has done this by investing in information and communication technology (ICT) to shift the point of care to patients’ homes. Through this model, nurses, community health workers, and trained family members provide first-level primary care at home, with serious cases monitored remotely by doctors and nurses.
3. Leverage digital technologies – High internet penetration can drive the adoption of telemedicine in India, improving resource efficiency and rapidly expanding access to health services. To these ends, India can replicate global best practices in telemedicine. These include using databases loaded with diagnosis protocols aggregated from the best hospitals, training field workers and on-call medics to reduce escalation of patients’ concerns to a doctor, and collaborating with hospitals, doctors, and diagnostic centres to provide services in remote areas.

India can also leverage its strength as a world leader in vaccine manufacturing (it contributes 60 per cent of global production) to sharpen its focus on preventive care. Indian vaccine manufacturers such as Serum Institute of India, Bharat Biotech, and Biological E are renowned worldwide for their contribution to reducing the cost of vaccines to about $1 per dose, making preventive healthcare more affordable than ever.

Reportedly, enabling universal access to healthcare through the adoption of Winning Leap solutions could help save $90 billion in capital costs in India’s healthcare delivery infrastructure.

Currently, the healthcare delivery system suffers from acute problems in terms of limited availability of hospital infrastructure and required workforce. To meet the desired outcomes in terms of hard and soft infrastructure capability, the healthcare delivery system will need to add 3.6 million beds, three million doctors and six million nurses over the next 20 years. This would require an investment of around $245 billion through traditional means. Such an investment would not only put fiscal pressure, but would be difficult to implement considering the nature and scale of new additions. For instance, over the last decade roughly 100,000 hospital beds have been added annually. If India continues to maintain this rate, it will fall short of the Winning Leap target by 1.6 million beds by 2034.

EH News Bureau