'Quality health care must for India'

New Delhi: Emphasising that India needs to transform its healthcare sector as it loses huge amount of money due to premature deaths and preventable illnesses every year, experts say that providing access to quality healthcare for 1.25 crore people was a huge challenge that the country must meet.

"We house 16 per cent of world's population and 21 per cent of world's disease burden equalling loss of 6 per cent of India's GDP due to premature deaths and preventable illnesses. It is estimated that the increasing Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) burden will cost India $4.58 trillion due to loss of productivity," said Nandakumar Jairam, chairman, FICCI Health Services Committee, according to a release.

At the same time, he said, India's total health spend is only 4.7 per cent of GDP and out of pocket expenditure (OOP) is 62 per cent of the total health spend. 

"This is very high when compared to other countries such as Brazil (25 per cent), China (32 per cent, South Africa (6 per cent), the US (11 per cent) and the UK (9 per cent)," he added. 

Vishal Bali, co-chairman, Ficci Health Services Committee and chairman, Medwell Ventures, said that unprecedented demand due to demographic changes and shifting disease patterns, coupled with rising costs and the proliferation of technology, has led to demand for efficiency, transparency in care delivery. 

"This has paved the way for innovation of processes and products and new business models in the healthcare sector to cater to the rising demand of the consumers. In view of the new era, it is time that we look at the Indian healthcare with a different lens keeping patient needs at the core and re-engineer the entire value chain of healthcare delivery," he said. 

Ashok Kakkar, who is also associated with the FICCI Health Services, said that India will have to bring in a complete paradigm shift in its healthcare system to provide good health services to its people.

The 10th edition of FICCI's annual healthcare conference - "FICCI HEAL" - will be organised here on August 31 and September 1, the release said.