Daijiworld Media Network - New Delhi
New Delhi, Sep 27: The Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare has recommended a major expansion of the Centres of Excellence (CoE) scheme to premier engineering and medical institutions across the country to help reduce the cost of healthcare and promote indigenous medical technologies.
In its 172nd report, the Committee highlighted the promising results of the MedTech Mitra platform, which has mentored more than 400 innovators. It also noted that Centres of Excellence established across seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have so far resulted in 43 indigenous medical technologies and 16 start-ups.
The Committee said greater self-reliance in medical technology could provide a sustainable means of reducing the cost of critical treatments. It cited the reduction already achieved in the prices of paediatric formulations, including isotretinoin and PREVALL, as examples of the potential benefits of indigenous innovation.
It recommended expanding the CoE network and strengthening support for start-ups developing medical technologies within the country.
The Committee also called for a dedicated procurement quota under national health programmes for indigenously developed and validated medical technologies. Such a mechanism, it said, would provide market access to start-ups and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that often struggle to move from research and development to commercial deployment.
The report also stressed the importance of Health Technology Assessment in India (HTAIn) in determining the cost-effectiveness and safety of healthcare interventions through evidence-based assessments.
Given the need to optimise government spending and reduce the out-of-pocket expenditure burden on citizens, the Committee recommended that systematic health technology assessments become a key basis for public healthcare expenditure.
It further recommended making HTAIn clearance mandatory before any new diagnostic tool, medical device, vaccine or therapeutic procedure is included in the procurement lists of the National Health Mission and the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY).
The Committee also proposed establishing state-level HTA nodes so that cost-effectiveness assessments can take into account regional health priorities and economic conditions and help extend healthcare programmes to underserved populations.
The report highlighted the proposed Medical Innovations Development Acceleration Council (MIDAC) as an important mechanism to reduce risks associated with biomedical research in areas that may have limited commercial incentives but are of significant public health importance.
The Committee recommended the immediate operationalisation and adequate funding of MIDAC to promote public-private partnerships, particularly in areas such as neglected tropical diseases and regional disease outbreaks.
It also underlined the importance of Model Rural Health Research Units (MRHRUs) and the Tribal Health Research Network in ensuring that new medical technologies reach vulnerable populations in rural, hilly and tribal areas.
The Committee recommended linking MRHRUs directly with the MedTech Mitra ecosystem so that emerging point-of-care technologies, including AI-enabled handheld X-ray devices and CRISPR-Cas-based diagnostic kits, can be field-tested and deployed in underserved rural and tribal regions.
The recommendations aim to strengthen India's domestic medical technology ecosystem while improving access to affordable healthcare and ensuring that publicly supported innovations reach patients in the country's most underserved areas.