Initiative

Disease Management Association of India Formed

DMAI would be setting up various committees with experts nominated in their relevant areas from India and abroad

A group of experts from the healthcare industry have formed Disease Management Association of India (DMAI). Disease management is known to ensure better compliance, thus ensuring better outcomes from the treatment and thereby reducing costs of treatments arising out of the fast progression of the chronic disease when not monitored and managed properly.

"It is clear that India can't have the best of facilities overnight in healthcare, but certainly, it can have programmes that ensure that the patient does not need to get into such facilities by neglecting his treatment," said Rajendra Pratap Gupta, Vice Chairman, Heartline Telemedical Services, India, while sharing his thoughts about the rationale behind the birth of this association.

Gupta, along with Kapil Khandelwal, Former Head-healthcare at Wipro Healthcare and Life Sciences, have launched the DMAI for the first time in India. This body will be functional as a not-for-profit entity. It intends to incorporate the stakeholders like insurance companies, pharma companies, healthcare providers, disease management associations and even Government bodies to come on a common platform and work towards the common goal of rooting this concept on Indian grounds.

Speaking about the role that all the stakeholders would play as members, Khandelwal said that firstly, they came together on a platform to share the concerns, ideas and experience of their running such programmes (if any). Secondly, they will pick up from where they are and what they are doing and start thinking on disease management. Thirdly, they will try and bring the international experience with DMAI on disease management and help the member companies devise and start running disease management programmes.

In India, diabetic nephropathy is expected to develop in 6.6 million of the 30 million patients suffering from diabetes. Number of people with hypertension is expected to see a quantum leap from an estimated 118.2 million in 2000 to 213.5 million in 2025. The projected foregone national income for India due to heart disease, stroke and diabetes during the period 2005 - 2015 is estimated to be more than $200 billion. According to experts, if this scenario is left without any intervention, it will lead to a medical and economic crisis in India. In order to sustain this increased burden of chronic care, India would require an incremental supply of over one million doctors and over 1.8 million nurses. At current rate of supply, India would fall short in incremental supply by over 40 per cent. "The other alternative is to create an enabling environment that would manage the situation through proper disease management strategies. DMAI has been formed to facilitate this specific objective to have an impact on and recognise the leadership, culture, people and processes in India. In fact, Disease Management of America is willing to help us develop this in India and we are also trying to get them involved into India," said Khandelwal.

DMAI would be setting up various committees with experts nominated in their relevant areas from India and abroad to drive the charter in eight different aspects of population disease and wellness management. The association proposes to leverage the disease and wellness portals of its members and affiliates to reach out and create stickiness to the patient population for the programmes. "Moreover, there are several organisations that have already some patient outreach programmes in place. DMAI plans to guide and strengthen these by providing a common platform to share best practices and outcomes. The vision for DMAI is to harness the best practices and improve the standards and accreditation norms for the concept and technologies through the expert committees that it will form," concluded Gupta.

Sonal Shukla