About Schemes
Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) is a scheme of the Government of India to provide free access to healthcare for 40% of people in the country. AB PM-JAY provides free secondary health care for that needing specialist treatment and tertiary health care for those requiring hospitalization.
It was launched in September 2018 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. That ministry later established the National Health Authority as an organization to administer the program.
PM-JAY offers service to 50 crore people and is the world's largest government sponsored healthcare program. The program is a poverty alleviation programme as its users are people with low income in India.
At the time of implementation of AB PM-JAY in Uttarakhand, in order to bring equity of access to quality healthcare services to all their residents, State government of Uttarakhand had implemented Atal Ayushman Uttarakhand Yojana in the State. This had ensured that all the State beneficiaries get all the benefits that are availed by the SECC beneficiaries under AB PM-JAY scheme. This scheme included all the unique features as that in PM-JAY. State has used same IT platform, guidelines, EHCPs, amount of coverage and health benefit packages as in PM-JAY. The implementation agency for the scheme too is the same (SHA & ISA).
In this case going one step ahead, State of Uttarakhand has decided to imbibe the good take away points from CGHS & PM-JAY and as per the GO issued on May 2020, State government had announced the launch of SGHS scheme for the State government employees and pensioners.
For the scheme, State had chosen the IT platform (BIS & TMS), same as in PM-JAY, for beneficiary identification and transactional process of the hospitals. The hospitals where beneficiaries may take the treatment are same as in PM-JAY.
The initiative taken by the State of Uttarakhand has made the State one and only State in India to provide total UHC to its entire beneficiary database. Through this initiative Uttarakhand had ensured that all their population get the same quality of care as the PM-JAY beneficiaries through robust IT platform in a transparent way.