With Coronavirus spreading across the country, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry has come up with a rational costing framework for treatment of Covid 19 in private hospitals.
The FICCI COVID-19 Response Task Force under the FICCI Health Services Committee has brought out the rational costing framework, an officials release said. FICC has brought out the frame work even as clinicians from across the globe and India are still grappling with defining treatment protocols for COVID-19. FICCI said that it was difficult to recommend a treatment especially for patients with co-morbidities.
They said that private healthcare providers are in the forefront of COVID crisis and supported the government in all its efforts. They also said that private health care sector was also badly affected because of the lockdown. Several of the private health care institutions had to face acute financial crisis, restricted mobility of doctors, nurses and healthcare workers, absence of frontline healthcare workers and doctors owing to contacting infection on duty, unavailability of drugs and PPEs at affordable rates and a viable costing framework.
The industrial body said that they have developed an accounting methodology for bringing in standardisation of cost of COVID treatment in the national interest. This has been categorised according to government referred patients, patients paying from out of pocket and for patients who are covered by TPAs and further been sub-categorised to three levels depending on the severity of the case, the release said.
A patient who is paying from out of pocket should pay Rs 17,000 per day for treatment in an isolation ward and Rs 45,000 per day for ICU (with ventilator), the release said. The rates include medicines, consumables and basic diagnostics, but exclude PPE costs, high end drugs and any co-morbidity. Also, they are indicative rates and there may be individual variations to the extent of five to ten per cent, the release said.
Sharing the details, FICCI president and Joint MD, Apollo Hospitals Group Dr Sangita Reddy said “in these difficult times, the private healthcare sector is doing its best to serve with high standards of ethics, transparency, professional competency and compassion”.
Chair- FICCI Health Services Committee and Chairman- Medica Group of Hospitals Dr Alok Roy said that there was an imperative need to acknowledge that COVID treatment costs is difficult to rationalise essentially due to the unknown nature of treatment required and various comorbidities associated with it.
FICCI said that they have submitted the costing framework to the Union and State Health Ministries. In the month of April, FICCI had submitted the first cut of the costing strategy which was based on hypothesis, the release said. The revised version was worked out based on analysis of actual data of 150 cases of COVID treatment in major private hospital, they said. .
It said that FICCI member hospitals have pledged to adopt these cost recommendations and display it transparently on their hospital website in their endeavour to fight this war against COVID-19.
At the same time, FICCI also urged that it is important that the government considers and adopts a scientific, plausible and coherent reimbursement criterion for any treatment that is viable for the providers.
