It was a sunny morning when Rudra Banerjee, a 46 years old software engineer from sector 5, Kolkata, got into his car heading home from the gym. After routine lifting weights, walking and running four miles on the treadmill when he started feeling pain in his chest. "May be I pulled a muscle", he thought. Sweat and pain were increasing when he reached home with an agonizing face. Sweta, her wife who is an IT engineer too, just got puzzled with the situation when she came to know that something really bad was going to happen. Is it a heart attack? the first question came to her mind when she saw her husband sweating badly keeping his hand on the chest. So many questions were coming into her mind like "what to do?" or "which hospital to go?" But the very first question she had was "whom to call for the guidance?"
There are plenty of cases in India with the medical scenario where this question "whom to call for guidance?" arise and most of the cases remain unanswered. Some ends with a fatal results and some leads to an unreasonably costly treatment. Very few are lucky enough to get out of hospital and go home with a smiling face as because they have a good medical reference.
The demand in even basic healthcare is huge in our country compared to the limited supply with reasonable price. Here comes the term "Healthcare Transparency" which can improve our healthcare framework to a great extend with the extensive involvement of patient parties. Transparent healthcare data is valuable for a wide scope of partners including patients/customers, businesses/buyers, wellbeing plans, social insurance experts, and policy makers. Research has discovered that transparency can support a patient and their families settle on educated decisions while choosing a health plan, medical clinic, clinical practice, or picking among elective medications, despite the fact that there are inquiries concerning how well and how regularly patients utilize such data and how best to present such data to general
society. Also, insurance transparency can take into consideration expanded trust in the patient-doctor relationship and
healthcare frameworks. Transparency can likewise improve quality, wellbeing and productivity all through the healthcare framework because of rivalry as well as the accessibility of clinical benchmarks.
There are two major parts in healthcare transparency 1) Price Transparency and 2) Clinical Performance Information Transparency. In country like India where the private healthcare sector is booming by leaps and bounds, there is a necessity to improvise a mechanism, so that any unreasonable or unethical medical practice can be reduced. The best way to maintain the transparency across the healthcare domain is to increase the awareness. Some platforms are showing their dedication to share the patient experience through which the clinics or doctors can be judged to some extent. A few websites are also working on the price transparency where the common surgery cost for different hospitals are published which would be very helpful for the patients who are having planned surgery. In some cases surgery costs are varying depending on the availability of the mediclaim policy. It is frequently seen that if someone has a mediclaim policy, the bill goes much higher. This part is also being included in those platforms so that the clinics with such unethical practice can be identified by the patient parties in advance. But all the platforms are solely dependent on the patient feedback and review. So it is unnecessary to say that patient feedback is at the core of the development and patients and their families can bring a huge change in the Indian healthcare sector by contributing very little in terms of review and rating.
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