INDIA: Irda Seeks To Boost Medical Tourism

In a major step towards helping subscribers of medical insurance (mediclaim) policies in India, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) has introduced a registry of unique hospital identification number called ROHINI, or Registry of Hospitals in Network of Insurance. The registry comprising details of approximately 33,000 healthcare service providers across the country will also benefit other stakeholders in the over Rs 20,000 crore Indian health insurance sector.

Elaborating on the benefits to policyholders, R Raghavan, CEO, IIBI, said that the platform will provide with a lot of analytical data from across hospitals registered with health insurance providers thus providing immense social benefits.

"The policyholders will be able to choose hospitals in the health insurance providers network easily based on the specialities, location preferences, empanelment of hospitals with insurance companies, etc.

"In the future, the registry can also help augment medical tourism by providing authentic information to prospective visitors from overseas for healthcare. Such a registry will also help curtail leakages in medical insurance claims leading to equitable premium levels," said Raghavan, adding that five years from now ROHINI will probably become the makemytrip of the Indian health insurance industry.

The initiative, which was kicked off two years ago, has gone through various stages of validating data about hospital network across India. With the help of GS1 (promoted by the Ministry of Commerce) India the hospitals are provided a 13 digit globally unique ID (GLN) and geo-coding that's done based on their address.

T S Vijayan, chairman, Irda, said, "The registry will help insurance industry gain access to transactional ease for empanelment, payment flow, investigations and data for health insurance analytics which will help in faster claim settlement."

The hospital self service portal also allows healthcare service providers to register and edit information and provide an electronic exchange of medical records between hospitals and insurance companies. The portal will facilitate national, state and regional level analytical reporting on healthcare aspects like geography based trends, patterns of disease occurrence and cost patterns which will help determine standardised treatment costs.

While there was no single credible registry of hospitals for the benefit of the stakeholders involved in the health insurance industry thus far, introduction of ROHINI is expected to bridge this gap in a big way.

"The registry would be a credible source of information on hospitals which are in the health insurance providers network and would lead to enhancing efficiency in the functions of all those involved in the health insurance space," said Raghavan.