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Rohini, National Registry Of Hospitals, Lends You A Credible Identity

In India, healthcare is largely inaccessible in the country and has humongous cost attached to it. Even after various health insurance companies in the fray to secure health, one ends up paying large sums of money because of high premiums. This is a result of inflated treatment costs in the medical bills and fake bills presented by patients, many times by tweaking the hospital names. On the other hand, insurance companies had no way to cross check the physical presence of hospitals in the absence of a national registry of hospitals.

But not anymore.

ROHINI — Registry of Hospitals in Network of Insurance (ROHINI), is an online national hospital repository based on Global Location Number(GLN), launched by the Indian Insurance Bureau (IIB), under IRDAI, with the aim to ensure faster claim settlement and establish a check on insurance claims by bringing in visibility to hospital identity.

Under ROHINI, all private hospitals and day-care centres are identified with a 13-digit globally unique GS1 identifier (GLN — Global Location Number) linked with its geo-coded address. This prevents duplicate listing of the same facility by tweaking in the hospital name. This expedites insurance claims processing time by enabling insurance companies to verify hospital identity.
With ROHINI, IIB addresses a serious concern of the health insurance sector: fraud. As per the reports, as many as 30 percent of all health claims are found to be fraudulent. Further, research shows that this fraud does not only arise from patients, but also is induced by hospitals and employees in the value chain, who try to file claims in the name of hospitals which do not exist or by making tweaks in the hospital name.

Reports also showed that the problem is even worse in States, where governments run mass health insurance schemes. ROHINI also aims to solve this by offering global standards based registry of Indian hospitals that can be verified by all insurance stakeholders. For this reason, it has been rightly called the ‘Aadhaar of Hospitals’.

Realising the benefit of unique identification of hospital locations, IRDAI has mandated that only hospitals listed under ROHINI can provide the facility of cashless hospitalisation.
Despite this, there are many hospitals in the country that are out of ROHINI’s ambit. These are majorly those hospitals that do not offer cashless insurance treatment but let patients run from pillar to post to get the reimbursement for their hospitalisation claims.

Another advantage for hospitals listed under ROHINI is that they can directly register under the Prime Minister Modi’s Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Scheme (AB-NHPS), which aims to facilitate healthcare services to over half a billion people in India. This enables ROHINI listed hospitals to serve thousands of patients falling under the scheme.

This offers a huge potential for private hospitals to increase footfalls of patients.

In future, data captured through ROHINI can be used by insurance companies, hospitals, and the government to run successful healthcare schemes by analysing data of claim patterns, cost of treatment, etc.

Also, information like services at each hospital, treatments offered, hospitalisation required for each treatment, and its cost can enable consumers/patients get visibility and make informed decisions.

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