PwC report identifies non-linear solutions to save $90 bn in capital costs in healthcare delivery infra

The report, The Future of India: The Winning Leap’ reveals that India will need additional 3.5 million hospital beds, three million doctors and six million nurses by 2034. Excerpts:

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) launched a report called ‘The Future of India: The Winning Leap’. It recommends that by adopting non-traditional solutions, infant mortality rate, could decrease from 44 to 31 in 2024 and to 12 in 2034. Similarly, the maternal mortality rate, could decrease to 124 in 2024 to 27 in 2034. It also identifies non-linear solutions which could save $90 billion in capital costs in India’s healthcare delivery infrastructure. These include:

• Build more with less: 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. Speciality 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, which enabled them to streamline and standardise operations, making their services more affordable. High asset utilisation as well as para-skilling of nurses have reduced doctor time, further helping to lower costs and enabling the staff to serve larger volumes of patients.
• 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.
• Leverage digital technology: 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 in vaccine manufacturing to sharpen its focus on preventive care. Moreover, to meet the desired outcomes in 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 e.g., in the last ten years 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.

So, it is essential for India to leverage ‘Winning Leap’ solutions that are non-linear in nature. The country needs solutions that can help maximise reach and efficacy and are cost-effective by a quantum margin.