Sweden, Nepal study India’s digital expansion of health insurance
New Delhi: Two countries at opposite ends of the development scale – one a much-vaunted welfare state and the other among the world’s poorest nations – have studied India’s AB PM-JAY, fascinated by the ambitions of the world’s largest health insurance scheme.
The delegations from Sweden and Nepal last week visited the National Health Authority (NHA), the government department responsible for ensuring that the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana reaches 500 million people through paperless digital platforms.
Dr RS Sharma, CEO, NHA said, “I am not sure what they want to learn from PM-JAY because that is for them to find out. The only thing we can disseminate to them is how we do PM-JAY. The two things about PM-JAY is its scale to reach 500 million people and secondly it is paperless. So we process everything on a digital form which makes everything transparent.”
“PM-JAY is not only digitizing itself and doing things better in controlling fraud, it is also helping others to digitize their platform. We are taking other health programs on PM-JAY’s digitized platform, such as CGHS (serving government employees and their families ). We have a program for transgenders and the Central Armed Police Forces (CARF). So other programs are also running on the PM-JAY platform.”
The state’s flagship for health insurance aims to provide health protection of ₹5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization to over 107 million poor and vulnerable families – or 500 million individuals – who constitute the bottom 40% of the population.
“The NHA has played a very critical and important role in creating access to healthcare across India. Both the work done via the development of health and wellness centers and the Ayushman Bharat healthcare program are run with the states,” says a member of the Swedish team.
The Swedish health delegation came as part of a visit by joint working groups (JWG) in the Sweden-India Health MoU. The idea of the meeting with the NHA was to get an introduction to its work, and the role it plays in public health.
“Sweden wants to explore possible partnerships between Swedish actors and NHA for its work on increased outcomes and quality care,” said the Swedish team member, who requested anonymity. “Sweden has developed expertise in the area of digital health and actually has an independent digital health agency. NHA has developed a strong digital health system – so there are multiple opportunities for mutual learning on both sides.”
To be sure, since its launch in 2018, only about 200 million Ayushman cards have been issued, partly due to a pandemic-related slowdown in pace.
Questions sent to Swedish and Nepalese embassy spokespeople remained unanswered.
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