Lily White Health Consortium Pvt. Ltd., a hospital management and consulting firm, views that the Indian healthcare industry will need to adopt the concept of shared clinical practice to offset the imbalance in the distribution of medical expertise.

There is disparity in the distribution of clinical load, leading to inadequate utilization of available doctors. The reality is that a few successful doctors are seen treating majority of patients spanning across metros, Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities. This is where the concept of ‘team practice’ and ‘shared clinical practice’ would go a long way to maximize the services of the ‘not so busy’ doctors, R Basil, co-founder, managing director & CEO, Lily White Health Consortium Pvt. Ltd, told Pharmabiz in an interaction.

The hospital management need have a critical role to transform the personal- professional outlook of busy doctors and identify teams of fresh doctors to maximize the resources.

From a total 315 medical colleges in the country of which 145 are private and the remaining 170 in government sector, 30,000 MBBS doctors and 18,000 specialists come out annually.

By 2020, India needs more resources including an additional one lakh hospital beds, 1.23 doctors per 1,000 population. It also needs 2.56 nurses per 1,000 population along with 200 per cent increase in medical technologists, pharmacists, paramedics and other healthcare workers. For this, the country will need to double the number of medical colleges to 600 and need 1500 nursing and paramedic colleges to generate the experts.

But the quality of medical, nursing and allied personnel is not of expected level to enable them to independently handle primary and secondary clinical needs. It is not just enough to have continuing medical education programmes but a correction is required in graduate and post graduate courses. The entire medical education system needs an overhaul, planners need to be sensitive and create result-oriented frameworks. Similarly, every hospital would need to mandate minimum hours of exposure to additional knowledge and novel skills per month to ensure medical team sensitivity to clinical outcomes, pointed out Basil.

The model of performance measurement and accountability of medical teams would allow the correction of under-utilization of doctors.

Other initiatives to offset the imbalance in the distribution of medical expertise would be by strengthening the telemedicine and mobile health  besides building up the health information highways to allow faster data driven decisions in clinical outcomes. It is high time India adopted a standardized format in electronic patient records which could support medical-insurance reforms. Only such  bold  initiatives could create efficiency and  affordability, stated Lily White Health Consortium chief.