Health equity through transparency and accountability

Healthcare in India could use the help of better data and analysis from both public health systems and private sector interventions

Better data is needed to enhance state intervention in health and nutrition and harness the strengths of the well-entrenched private sector to achieve public health goals. To meet the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the next 15 years, it is important to measure progress closely and ensure mid-course corrections when needed.

Availability and use of regular, good quality health data is increasingly becoming a policy imperative. , the National Health Policy 2017 seeks to decrease the MMR to 100 per 1 lakh live births by 2020.

While administrative data on morbidity exists in hospitals, these are never compiled or analysed systematically. Improved levels of standardisation at the point of data collection will facilitate data use and policy discussions informed by relevant numbers.

India, like China, has a real economic reason to invest in universal health coverage, apart from equity. To make that investment for the future meaningful, high quality data is inevitable. India is planning to undertake an ambitious step towards UHC through the National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), which will reportedly cover 70% of the Indian population. Ensuring a seamless transition from the existing Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) to the proposed NHPS will require insights from the analysis of RSBY scheme data as well as survey data on its impact. It is time for India to drop the much-discussed apprehension to programme evaluations and to liberate data being collected under schemes and by institutions to facilitate independent evaluations.

Oommen C Kurian heads the Health Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. This column summarises the discussions from a panel discussion on the importance of data for decision-making organised jointly by ORF and BMGF.The views expressed are personal