Mission Report: Arogya Manthan 2022 New Delhi, India

Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB PMJAY) is the largest public health insurance scheme in the world that is fully funded by the government. It was launched on 23^rd September 2018 by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi of India. It sought to address several issues that India faced, notably, high out-of-pocket expenditure on health at almost 60 % of total health expenditure, one of the highest in the world, as well as catastrophic health expenditure. These issues push nearly 6 crore (60,000,000) people into impoverishment. The implementation of PMJAY is a step towards achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and it provides INR 5 lakhs (500,000) per family annually to cover secondary and tertiary hospitalisation services to over 10.74 crore (107,400,000) vulnerable families that are the bottom 40 % of the population.

Three years later, on 27^th November 2021, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) was established to facilitate digitisation of healthcare and provide an interoperable digital health ecosystem. The Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) IDs have been created (about 25 Crore (250,000,000) since the ABDM rollout) as well as 158,000 health facilities have been registered, including linking more than 5 million health records digitally.

The National Health Authority (NHA) organised Arogya Manthan 2022 on 25^th and 26^th September 2022 to celebrate four years of AB PMJAY and one year of ABDM. Both, AB PMJAY and ABDM, are flagship schemes of the Government of India that were launched to promote accessible and affordable healthcare and create a digital health ecosystem driven by digital innovations to support integration of the digital health infrastructure of the country. The agenda for the conference is provided in Appendix 1.

The NHA invited international experts from many countries, including from the Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP), Thailand to speak at the conference on the topic of “HTA for Evidence Informed PMJAY Decisions: What to Buy, Whom to Buy & Price?” to share experiences from Thailand on utilising HTA on decision-making in Thailand as well as how it helps the government fund interventions offering good value-for-money and avoid funding interventions that offer low or no value. The list of participants from HITAP and invitation letters are provided in Appendix 2 and 3, respectively.

This report summarises the proceedings of the conference and highlights lessons learned, with supporting documents in the Appendix.