Tamil Nadu Finance Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan on Wednesday said his ministry is working with the State's National Health Mission to develop an outcome-based approach to bring more clarity on the money spent on healthcare.
"The Finance Ministry takes active role in ensuring the efficiency with which the people's money is spent. But today we don't even collect data, we don't how many show up for work or which machine is functioning and how many patients are benefiting. Since there is no data, there can't be analysis as well," the minister said.
He was addressing an event 'Digital Transformation in Healthcare - Opportunities for collaboration between Australia and Tamil Nadu', organised by Australia India Business Exchange (AIBX) in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry.
Success rate untraced
Thiaga Rajan said although the State has been at the forefront in healthcare across many parameters, the success rate of the treatments are not traced. "In any spending, we have been department-centric or cost -centric but not beneficiary centric. We have decent outcomes but it can be even better if we get more clarity on beneficiaries," he added.
He said Tamil Nadu can emulate from States like Karnataka and Telangana to have a common database to improve efficiency and avoid redundancy of programmes.