Postdoctoral Fellow Spotlight: Radhika Jain on Reducing Inequalities in Health Care and Outcomes

Postdoctoral Fellow Spotlight: Radhika Jain on Reducing Inequalities in Health Care and Outcomes

Radhika Jain, a postdoctoral fellow with the Asia Health Policy Program, shares insights on her research into India’s health care system and how it is responding to both the COVID-19 pandemic and standard healthcare needs of citizens.
[Left] Radhika Jain, [Right] Postdoc Spotlight, Radhika Jain, Asia Health Policy Program Radhika Jain, a postdoctoral fellow at APARC with the Asia Health Policy Program.

In the time of COVID-19, the attention of physicians and policymakers alike has largely been focused on responding to the immediate needs of people experiencing the fallout from the novel coronavirus. For Radhika Jain, a postdoctoral fellow with the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) at APARC, the pandemic has further highlighted the importance of advancing policies that support effective and equitable public health systems.

We sat down with Jain to discuss her work and recent research into the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the efficacy of India’s healthcare services for people living with chronic, non-communicable diseases. Listen to the full conversation above or via our Soundcloud channel.

[Subscribe to APARC’s newsletters to get the latest from our researchers.]

Jain’s research focuses on the role of the private sector in health systems, frictions in health care markets, the extent to which public health policies serve the needs of target populations, and health policy design in lower-income countries. In particular, she studies India's health care system, probing into data sets and administrative records to identify the factors that contribute to poor health outcomes and determine what interventions increase the effectiveness of public health insurance.

In the case of India, the private healthcare sector is highly fragmented and made up of a collage of small and independently-run hospitals and service providers with varying levels of oversight and administrative regulation. Gathering data on patient costs, insurance use, and benefit allocation for different cohorts of people using private healthcare in the world's second-most populous nation is a central pillar in Jain's efforts to better understand and document how health systems are used and how they can be improved to better serve vulnerable populations.

COVID-19 Lockdown Impacts on Non-COVID Health Care and Outcomes


For Jain, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have re-emphasized the crucial role that a well-functioning public, government-backed health system plays in providing care to citizens during times when the private sector experiences sudden and severe disruptions. Working in collaboration with Pascaline Dupas, the faculty director at the Stanford King Center on Global Development and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Jain has documented the adverse effects of COVID-19 on accessibility to health services for patients needing treatment for chronic, non-communicable diseases.("The Effects of India’s Covid-19 Lockdown on Critical Non-Covid Health Care and Outcomes: Evidence From a Retrospective Cohort Analysis of Dialysis Patients"

Jain's and Dupas' recent working paper (published in AHPP's Working Paper Series) shows that the abrupt, severe lockdown instituted by the Indian government as a preventive measure against the spread of the coronavirus had widespread impacts on individuals' ability to receive care for non-COVID-related healthcare needs such as dialysis. Their findings indicate that, among patients needing dialysis, the death rate between April and July 2020 was 25 percent higher than the death rate for a comparable cohort in the same months in 2019.

During something like a pandemic, the importance of having a social safety net and a strong public health system that the government can deploy to protect households experiencing medical hardships becomes all the more clear.
Radhika Jain
Postdoctoral Fellow, Asia Health Policy Program

This increase in mortality is directly related to disruptions to critical health service delivery and accessibility caused by the lockdown measures. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed by Jain and Dupas reported experiencing disruptions to their care, with travel barriers and hospital closures or refusals cited as the most common causes. As a cohort, vulnerable populations were affected most by both the lockdown and ensuing disruptions to healthcare access.

Discrepancies like this between how a health system performs on paper and what happens in real-world practice is something Jain has a deeper appreciation for in light of the pandemic. “There were many policy prescriptions about how to respond to the lockdown, but what was done in India was a poorly conceived political response,” she cautions. “That’s something we who work on health policy need to keep in mind and contend with: What is the role of the political system, what is the role of the health system, and how does our research interact with all of that?”

Looking ahead, Radhika intends to continue researching and writing recommendations on how to make health systems viable and usable for all populations, including the most vulnerable. In particular, she is interested in investigating strategies to close engagement gaps and accessibility challenges women in India experience in utilizing healthcare services. She will continue working at APARC as a postdoctoral fellow with the Asia Health Policy Program through the end of the 2021-22 academic year.

Read More

Portrait of Young Kyung Do, Winner of the 2020 Rothman Epidemiology Prize
News

Asia Health Policy Program Alum Wins Rothman Epidemiology Prize

Dr. Young Kyung Do, an expert in health policy and management at the Seoul National University College of Healthy Policy and the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in Asia health policy at APARC, has been awarded the 2020 prize for his outstanding publication in the journal Epidemiology last year.
cover link Asia Health Policy Program Alum Wins Rothman Epidemiology Prize
An elderly individual travels in a cart up a street.
News

Researchers Develop New Method for Projecting Future Wellness of Aging Populations

Asia Health Policy Director Karen Eggleston and her colleagues unveil a multistate transition microsimulation model that produces rigorous projections of the health and functional status of older people from widely available datasets.
cover link Researchers Develop New Method for Projecting Future Wellness of Aging Populations
A man with interacts with 'Emiew,' a humanoid robot.
News

“Co-Bots,” Not Overlords, Are the Future of Human-Robot Labor Relationships

Yong Suk Lee and Karen Eggleston’s ongoing research into the impact of robotics and AI in different industries indicates that integrating tech into labor markets adjusts, but doesn’t replace, the long-term roles of humans and robots.
cover link “Co-Bots,” Not Overlords, Are the Future of Human-Robot Labor Relationships