Devbrat Ohri, Senior VP – Government Oprations, Medi Assist, presented a case study on Manipur’s health scheme. He began with talking about the challenges North Eastern states face in providing health services to their people. In the light of the fact, that these states have difficult terrains and are also overlooked by the government in many ways, he said that the state of Manipur spreads around 22,000 sq kilometres and has a population of about 30 lakhs, but the state has only two multi-speciality hospitals, both being government hospitals and there is a serious lack of health infrastructure.
He also explained the healthcare cost dynamic within the state. The health funds allotted to the state is meagre, he informed. He also drew comparisons on the cost of child delivery in the state which is an average of approximately Rs 1500 for a normal delivery in a government set up as compared to other states which have lower rates. Therefore, an all encompassing health protection scheme becomes very significant in this state. Ohri explained the health protection scheme that the state offers and informed about the striking features of this programme.
“We wanted to provide a comprehensive scheme to the people so we created a technology platform and integrated the Jan Aushadhi (656 drugs), the NHM free medical services scheme along with our health scheme. Initially anything that was not available within the state, we had to send patients outside. So, integrating these three things we created a Rogi Kalyan Samiti account where government hospitals were asked to provide this treatment, along with providing medicines from the Jan Aushadhi and diagnostics from a vendor with whom the government has negotiated on the lower price for its services. With this, we realised that the cost of health services came down to almost 30-40 per cent.
So, with the 30-40 per cent of the cost saved, the state intends to effectively utilise these funds to upgrade the infrastructure and services, to ensure that the poorest of the poor get treatment at the CHCs, PHCs, district medical hospitals and regional medical centres. The vision is to provide greater care to a large number of people using the government services.
He also later pointed out that the state still faces some challenges in reaching out to extremely remote areas but they are working on building a system where they can get these people also under the care territory.