What India Has To Teach About Running Hospitals

Ask a Westerner for her perception of hospitals in India and she’ll probably think of the nation’s status as a “developing country” and assume that hospitals provide a mediocre standard of care without access to state of the art medical technologies.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: India’s medical system is incredibly varied, and includes several very high-quality facilities. The way some private hospitals in particular are run provides a number of fascinating lessons in health policy that the United States might want to consider signing up for.

As the United States struggles to reform its broken health care system, one of the biggest issues involved is controlling costs. Indian hospitals manage to provide a superb quality of care at a fraction of the cost spent in the United States, explain Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Ravi Ramamurti in the Washington Post, so how do they do it? And how can we look to India for a model to reduce hospital costs while still maintaining high patient care standards?