The Centre plans to develop a comprehensive website for healthcare and is in talks with the Insurance Information Bureau (IIB), an arm of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), in this regard.

“The officials of the Government of India have expressed interest in having a portal, similar to the portal for health insurance recently launched by us. We are looking at data convergence and other aspects,” R Raghavan, Chief Executive Officer, IIB, told BusinessLine .

If the plan fructifies, all public agencies involved in healthcare may be brought under the portal for the purpose of data sharing and for uniformity and standardisation of the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) network.

IIB has launched a portal, Rohini, to serve as a registry of hospitals in the insurance network. It will allow hospitals to register, make changes, and add information, among others, through permitted access, providing them with visibility and faster claim processing.

The list now consists of about 33,000 unique hospitals, arrived at after an extensive exercise of automated as well as manual de-duplication undertaken by the IIB.

According to the bureau, the registry can become a ‘strong backbone’ to all e-governance initiatives by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, public health manager and health industry. “It is this possibility that is being explored now,” Raghavan said.

Mushrooming start-ups

As the healthcare industry witnesses mushrooming growth of tech-based start-ups, it is increasingly looking at Rohini. “We have been approached by a good number of healthcare start-ups and related young entrepreneurs. They are keen to exploit the huge data advantage our portal has,” the CEO said.

IIB is in the processing of enhancing the capacity of the online registry with attributes, such as number of beds, specialisation, details of doctors, classification of hospitals into clinics, hospitals, and diagnostic centres.

The healthcare sector in the country is expected to grow to $280 billion by 2020 at a compound annual growth rate of 16 per cent, according to a recent FICCI-KPMG report. Healthcare expenditure now stands at 4.2 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

India currently spends cumulatively 4.2 per cent of its GDP on healthcare, with just 1 per cent being contributed by the public sector, which is amongst the lowest in the world.

Related Topics