- The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has finalised India’s first National Essential Diagnostics List (NEDL) which aims to bridge the current regulatory system’s gap that do not cover all the medical devices and in-vitro diagnostic device (IVD). It is on the lines of the essential drugs list, the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) which was first released in 1996 and last updated in 2015.
- ICMR recommends that at least 159 tests should be made available for patients in even rudimentary government health facilities.
- With this, India has become the first country to compile such a list that would provide guidance to the government for deciding the kind of diagnostic tests that different healthcare facilities in villages and remote areas require.
- The list is meant for facilities from village till the district level.
- The diagnostics list mentions 105 general laboratory tests for a broad range of common conditions, 30 disease-specific tests such as for HIV, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and 24 imaging tests including X-rays, CT and MRI scans and ultrasound sonography
WHO list
- World Health Organisation released first edition of essential diagnostics list (EDL) in May 2018. But India’s diagnostics list has been customised and prepared as per landscape of India’s health care priorities.
- NEDL builds upon the Free Diagnostics Service Initiative and other diagnostics initiatives of the Health Ministry to provide an expanded basket of tests at different levels of the public health system.
Benefits
- Implementation of NEDL would enable improved health care services delivery through evidence-based care, improved patient outcomes and reduction in out-of-pocket expenditure; effective utilisation of public health facilities; effective assessment of disease burden, disease trends, surveillance, and outbreak identification; and address antimicrobial resistance crisis too.
- “While affordability of diagnostics is a prime concern in countrieslike India, low cost, inaccurate diagnostics have made their way into the Indian market which has no place in the quality health care system,” said a senior official at ICMR
