India proposes Clinical Establishment Act

India’s Health Ministry has recently established legislation that, if passed, will mandate all private hospitals, nursing homes, and diagnostic centers in India to be registered with the government.  It’s part of not only the effort to improve the quality across the board of the medical treatment given to Indians, but also to foster the country’s medical tourism industry. 

“The Clinical Establishment Act was sent for Cabinet approval [in mid November]. We expect it to get passed in the budget session of Parliament next year. The Act will come into force by the middle of next year and will register all healthcare institutes, infrastructure and human resource in the field,” Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said. “We will give two years (from the time the law comes into force) to these health centers to apply for mandatory registration.”  

It’s all about accreditation and medical quality—factors crucial to medical tourism and good healthcare in general.  Accreditation begets the high quality service and vice versa.  Proponents of the legislation hope to see the country’s medical infrastructure and health tourism industry grow with the passage of the Act.   

Several hospitals are preparing themselves for the accredited healthcare era that the Health Ministry is hoping to establish with the proposed Clinical Establishment Act. So far, there are just a handful of Joint Commission International (JCI)-accredited hospitals in India: Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai and three of Apollo Hospitals in Chennai, Delhi, and Hyderabad.  Yet there are many excellent facilities in India, and many are in the process of earning JCI accreditation or another set of standards.    

“Good quality is good business," says Mr Daljit Singh, CEO of Fortis Healthcare Ltd, which is associated with the American health delivery systems Partners HealthCare System Inc. and hopes to earn its accreditations from the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals Healthcare Providers in India and from the JCI soon.  "The primary driver has to be patient safety. Healthcare systems that can generate confidence and bring in reliability in delivery of clinical treatment, will find patients who do not mind paying that little bit extra.”   

“The parameters will apply to a hospital which has 500 or 5,000 beds. It will also apply to diagnostic centers. Right now, a person gets two different reports if they go to two centers for a blood test. We have to standardize this,” said Ramadoss.  “We are also planning to set up a medical park that will enable us to manufacture medical equipment for the country. Currently, 90% of the medical equipment used in the country [is] imported. The new initiative, in collaboration with the commerce ministry, will cut down costs in a major way."

“[Healthcare] is expected to grow in another four to five year’s time,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said.  “This sector has to play a vital role in the future for improving healthcare in the country.”

While it is undoubtedly the case that the support of a country's government, one concern with the passage of this Act must be that since private enterprise that has done so much to promote medical tourism in India and elsewhere, that same initiative is not overrun by a government bureaucracy that is too big for its own good.  Nevertheless, it would seem that an effort to establish a standard set of practices, as long as they are of the highest quality, is a move in the right direction for India and its medical tourism and healthcare industries.