ASCI, Inorder, and ACCESS Health To Offer Unique Healthcare Management Courses

Hyderabad: Prestigious health systems training and research institutes, Administrative Staff College of India and InOrder, in association with global health systems think tank ACCESS Health International, have come together to deliver programmes on Health Informatics and Health Insurance, two upcoming and relevant fields in healthcare management.

The six-month-long online Management Development certificate programmes were officially launched at the ASCI campus. The courses will commence in December 2021. The areas of health informatics and health insurance are critical given the launch of flagship public health programmes such as the Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojana and the more recently announced Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. These factors, combined with the expansion of private healthcare, including digital health and the private health insurance industry, make it critical to prepare a cadre of trained healthcare professionals capable of managing these complex systems.

Speaking at the launch, ASCI’s Director General (I/c) Dr Nirmalya Bagchi stressed the importance of collaborative training programs. "We have been focussing on offering courses in collaboration with other national and international universities. In the partnership with InOrder, ASCI brings in its class of hospital management infrastructure and theoretical background, while InOrder and ACCESS Health bring practitioners, especially in the field of insurance and health management. This programme is sure to attract diverse healthcare professionals," he said.

The courses are open to participation from health professionals from across the public and private sectors. The goal of the Health Insurance Program is to provide theoretical and practical knowledge for planning, designing, implementing, and monitoring a health insurance scheme, as well as to analyse recent trends in government and private health insurance schemes. The Health Informatics programme aims to provide skills needed to work with informatics and data-based medico-metrics to enhance the clinical, managerial, and business decision-making ability of the participants.

Senior cardiologist and President of InOrder, Dr Krishna Reddy Nallamalla, spoke about the need for healthcare management and healthcare business management as important areas of education given the complexity of healthcare provision. "A complex social system requires competent leadership. Grooming people to manage and govern healthcare in an ethical way is the need of the hour. With the constantly evolving areas of healthcare provision and health information, newer skills are required to manage purchases of healthcare and the complex provider-purchaser relationship," Dr Reddy said.

The courses were officially launched with the release of the programme brochures by Dr Bagchi, Dr Reddy, Dr Uma Aysola (Head of Alliances and Partnerships at ACCESS Health), course directors Dr Subodh Kandamuthan and Dr Saswat Kishore Mishra from ASCI and Dr Anju Aggarwal and Dr Arundhathy Mamidi from ACCESS Health along with Dr Shrikant Kalaskar from InOrder.