Brookings India hosted a next Development Seminar, delivered by Professor Sarang Deo who drew upon his work on a pilot model to engage the private sector to improve the quality of tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment while allowing them to retain their patients.

Abstract: India is home to a fourth of the global burden of tuberculosis (TB), 2.2 million new cases every year of the 8.6 million globally. TB incidence rate has not reduced substantively despite sustained efforts, and one of the main hypotheses for this phenomenon is the poor quality of TB diagnosis and treatment in the private sector that is often the first point of contact for a majority of patients and treats more than half of India’s TB cases. Previous efforts at private sector engagement have met with limited success because of their emphasis on generating referrals for the national program, which are seen by private providers as being detrimental to their business model.

Motivated by these observations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded and helped design a pilot private sector engagement model. Over a period of about four years (September 2014 to August 2018), just under 100,000 TB cases have been notified from these pilots with more than 70% treatment completion rates.

In the seminar, Deo will discuss learnings from the pilot, including the operational and economic modeling effort that informed its design, as well as the costs for potentially scaling up to the national level. He will also share insights on TB diagnostic pathways in India from data gathered through patient interviews as well as evidence regarding change in diagnostic test ordering behaviour of private providers over the course of the pilot using provider-level program data on usage of diagnostic vouchers.

Speaker Profile: Sarang Deo is Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business, and the Executive Director of Max Institute of Healthcare Management. His primary area of interest is health care operations with special emphasis on investigating the impact of operations decisions on population level health outcomes.

Discussant:

Anand Ranganathan studied Chemistry at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and went on to pursue a doctorate from Cambridge. He is researching dengue and tuberculosis at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Delhi and Special Centre for Molecular Medicine, JNU.

The event is open to the public and media.