Care Arogya Kendra:
The Care Foundation started the Care Arogya Kendra program in Maharashtra in February of 2008. The project delivers health care to 50 villages using a community-based, technology-leveraged outreach model where grassroots community workers are trained as ‘Village Health Champions’ (VHCs) and equipped with hand held devices, enabling doctors a district-level hub to remotely attend to the patient in the village, averting the need for travel to a clinic and therefore the loss of wages. If the illness requires greater medical attention, patients are referred to the ‘CARE Arogya Clinic’ located at Yavatmal for further investigations and treatment and to CARE hospitals at Nagpur and Hyderabad, for speciality and superspeciality care, respectively.
Currently, more than 65% of primary care treatments are addressed at village level by healtworker through remote doctor support and 35% are treated at referral primary health centers.
Health Microinsurance:
CARE Foundation has also partnered with the Centre for Insurance and Risk Management (CIRM) to create a microinsurance product sold by the VHCs in the form of pre-paid health cards. Individuals who purchase the cards receive services on a fee-for-services basis at nominal prices from the VHC network, plus assistance to obtain hospitalization wherever required. Currently, this project is supported by ILO Micro-insurance Facility.
The program has already enrolled 600 families (i.e 3000 lives) in the last 10 months through a network of 41 health workers for its stand alone primary healthcare product. The product costs Rs 300 for a family of 4 (2 adults and 2 children) and covers consultation, drugs, blood tests, IV fluids and injections with a sum assured of Rs 2500 and with provisions of cashless service and no limits on frequency of usage. The current micro-insurance indicators are as follows: penetration/coverage: 6%; per-capita frequency: 0.67; incurred claims ratio: 33%, average claim cost per patient: Rs 48.
To learn more about developments and lessons from project, you can visit CARE Hospital's Learning Journey page at the ILO Microinsurance Innovation Facility's website.
As of July 1, 2009, CARE Foundation has also taken up the operations of the health module of the Byraju Foundation.
