Mumbai: India’s private hospitals should not be viewed on the price of individual drugs, injections or consumables without accounting for the wider clinical value chain involved in delivering care, Max Healthcare chairman and managing director Abhay Soi said, amid growing scrutiny over hospital pricing.
Soi’s comments come against the backdrop of Maharashtra scrutinising steep markups on hospital consumables and the Supreme Court’s recent observation on a cancer drug carrying a markup of 10 times with patients required to procure it through in-hospital pharmacies.
“By the end of the day, a hospital is not selling an IV fluid bag. A hospital is not selling an injection,” Soi said. “A hospital is administering the injection.”
“There is a particular training, there is a particular sort of storage requirement, then administering the medicine and then disposal through proper biomedical waste processes. There is an entire value chain,” he said.
Hospitals have thousands of individual billing items, with margins varying across products and services, Soi said. “Some won’t have margin, some will have margin. But ultimately it translates to that 8-9% net profit,” Soi said.
