Background
Aysuhman Bharat is a flagship scheme of Government of India (GOI) which was conceived to achieve vision of Universal Health Coverage. Pradahan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (PM-JAY) was launched in year 2018 for providing secondary and tertiary care under the banner of Ayushman Bharat. National Health Authority which is an apex body to manage PM-JAY scheme, claims it as World’s largest government sponsored insurance scheme. With this study we planned to optimise work flow of PM-JAY scheme in our hospital The Gujarat Cancer & Research Institute, a state cancer institute in Gujarat, India.
Methods
An interventional study was planned to identify end to end hospital based which are responsible for functioning of PM-JAY scheme and to identify solutions to optimize it. Intervention such as trainings, new Information Technology modalities, revised hospital policies were introduced in month of October 2021, change in average number of monthly discharge from PMJAY patients were assessed for a period of six months before and six months after introduction of intervention.
Results
Entire process of executing PM-JAY scheme was studied by doing Root cause analysis and was improved by using lean six sigma tool. With introduction of intervention, we have observed a monthly increase of 143.5% and 35% among day care discharge and overall discharges respectively. This rise was found to be statistically significant by unpaired t test.
Conclusion
There are defined protocols and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for executing PM-JAY software, however there are other bunch of associated processes and factors which are equally important for timely execution of PMJAY scheme. Such factors can be identified at hospital level and can be refined with introduction of hospital based SOPs, trainings and IT solutions to accelerate the entire work flow of PMJAY scheme and ultimately fasten the patient movement. Considering this study as reference, health department and PM-JAY nodal agency should undertake such studies on national level which can optimize functioning of this scheme on national levels.