03/10/2020 - Health

KEY POINTS

·         NPCI launched the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which revolutionised India’s payment industry. Today, UPI is the fastest-growing payment platform in the world, accounting for more than a billion monthly transactions.

·         The prime minister launched the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM). NDHM will create an “open digital health ecosystem” like what UPI created in financial services.

·         It will serve as a backbone for integrated digital health infrastructure and provide a platform for private innovations. Key features will include standardised health registries, unique patient IDs, patient health records, automatic claim settlement engines, etc.

Five themes will drive this transformation.

• Information transparency: Currently, there is no reliable repository of data to verify a health facility or a doctor. This promotes quackery. NDHM’s “health registries” will act as a single source of truth for all health stakeholders. This will increase trust in the ecosystem and reduce administrative burden related to doctor onboarding, regulatory approvals and renewals, and hospital or payer empanelment.
• Standardised claim processing: Currently, the claim settlement process is time-consuming and expensive. It stretches the short-term capital requirements for providers and entails high administrative burden for insurers. NDHM’s claims engine will enable faster validation of claims and easy fraud prevention, thereby driving improved unit economics.
• Prescription digitisation: NDHM will accelerate the digitisation of providers’treatment advice. This will re-balance the power. Players that can digitally engage prescribers consume e-prescriptions to up-sell or cross-sell, offer expanded services such as nudges for prescription adherence, will win.
• Playground for innovations: The government plays the role of a health provider, payer, and regulator. With NDHM, the government’s role will expand to building common playgrounds, leveraged by all entities to build innovative solutions.