India, June 8 -- Currently, many government hospitals and public health facilities function without NABL accreditation. This underscores the need to build a parallel grassroots-level accreditation system, modeled along the lines of National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers (NABH), but adapted to rural realities. Such a system would ensure minimum quality benchmarks, especially for programme-related diagnostics and should be integrated into national health schemes including those under the Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY.

The lack of structured quality control has allowed an influx of unreliable diagnostic tools in both public and private sectors. Each diagnostic batch, like medicines, must undergo quality verification befo...