‘National Health Protection Scheme has not been thought through fully’

NEW DELHI: The centre’s ambitious National Health Protection Scheme needs to be integrated with primary healthcare to make it viable and sustainable, Kiran Mazumdar-shaw, chairperson and managing director, Biocon Ltd said in an interview.

Regulatory compliance is a big challenge for everyone across the world and firms in India need to adapt to changing regulatory environment at a rapid pace, she said. At Biocon, she wants to focus on insulin therapy and wants the company to provide a Biocon product to one in five people across the world. Edited excerpts:

An ambitious National Health Protection Scheme was announced in this budget. What do you think about the scheme and the sector overall?

The NHPS announced in this budget is welcome and long overdue because it shows that there is a thinking and a focus on some form of Universal Health Care (UHC) for at least the poor strata of our population.

The bigger question we need to ask is it is just a cashless hospitalisation scheme or is this is an end-to-end healthcare scheme? That’s a fundamental question we have to ask.

Do you mean to say that we need to integrate primary and tertiary care to make it implementable?

Correct; if you don’t combine it and integrate it with primary care, it won’t work because you will only find people going to the hospitals. Now, we need to make sure that you down-stage the disease so that the people actually going to the hospitals, either secondary or tertiary, will really be the ones that need to go.

Are you concerned about implementation of the scheme?

I am saying if you want to implement the scheme and are looking at secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation, it’s never going to be viable. It’s not going to sustain because of the amount you need.

My view is, before you roll out a whole plan, you should do it on about a million families, like a pilot. Then, the ₹2,000 crore will be well spent because you need to map it out and see how it works.

But if the government wants to start from scratch and build it up ground up, it’s going to take a lot of time because I feel that it’s not been thought through fully.