NEW DELHI – With patient care and safety emerging as a major concern, a US-based health care organization has launched a certification service for hospitals for the first time in India.

KEMP Health care has started a comprehensive collection of evidence-based performance indicators that have been tried and tested in international health care systems as reliable benchmarks. The hospitals would be evaluated on parameters like safety, quality, timeliness, effectiveness and patient satisfaction.

It would then rate hospitals on a five star scale.

This certification would give the hospitals additional credibility and confidence within an increasingly competitive market and will make them more attractive to the health insurance providers, panel companies and also to the foreign visitors coming to India for medical tourism, Pallav Bhatnagar, KEMP managing Director, said Monday.

Bhatnagar said it was ironical that the country which has one of the most contemporary health care systems in the world does not have a formal mechanism to gauge how good it is.

On one hand we have sophisticated health care facilities, while on the other we have numerous clinics and nursing homes that inundate the cities and are trying to provide the best care with their limited resources, making the entire health care delivery system in India look patchy and sporadic, added Bhatnagar.