Using CMEs To Boost Access To Quality Tertiary Care In Uttar Pradesh

Medical colleges are pivotal in providing quality tertiary care to people from across the social strata in India. In Uttar Pradesh, they constitute an integral part of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) which services over three crore beneficiaries. To augment service delivery under the scheme and boost the participation of medical colleges in PM-JAY, ACCESS Health—the technical partner for SACHIS, the state health agency implementing the scheme in Uttar Pradesh—has been working towards piloting a model with four premier medical colleges.

Through this pilot, ACCESS Health is facilitating the Continuing Medical Education (CME) of the medical colleges with the aid of private partners. With an aim to build capacities—both for standard treatment guidelines (STGs) under PM-JAY and advanced diagnostics for quality care—two CME workshops have been conducted so far in collaboration with Pathkind Diagnostics Private Limited. The first workshop was conducted at Maharani Lakshmi Bai Medical College Jhansi, where a session on advanced diagnostics for treating tuberculous was helmed by Pathkind for over 60 doctors from the institute. MRA Medical College in Ambedkar Nagar was chosen for the second workshop that was conducted virtually and saw the participation of close to 40 doctors.

Easing challenges stemming from diagnostic gaps is one of the key objectives of this pilot intervention with medical colleges in Uttar Pradesh, and the CME workshops are a step in that direction. The workshops also use real examples from the claims generated by the medical colleges to identify errors and omissions in the adherence of STGs and demonstrate how to avoid them. These hand-holding sessions aim to provide clarity on process-oriented nuances of PM-JAY in order to speed up claim adjudication process and thus the release of payments to the medical colleges.

These two workshops are the first in a series of CME sessions planned by ACCESS Health for the pilot medical colleges in Uttar Pradesh.