Heart care costs could spike across India.
Speaking at their annual state conference in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday, cardiologists mounted a push against a federal medical directive, warning that strict new restrictions will shut ordinary families out of life-saving cardiac care. The Cardiological Society of India (CSI) Kerala chapter formally asked the Director General of Health Services (DGHS) to review an order prohibiting the sterilisation and reuse of single-use devices and disposable surgical items in catheterisation laboratories.
Central health regulators issued the ban to curb cross-infection, hardware malfunctions, and procedure-related complications. Yet clinicians on the ground insist that a total prohibition disregards hospital realities. Interventional cardiac procedures rely heavily on specialized consumables—including coronary catheters and guidewires—that run up steep bills when discarded after a single passage. Without the option to reprocess select tools under rigorous hospital protocols, routine interventions will drift beyond standard financial reach.
"Reimbursement package rates under government-funded health insurance schemes were often inadequate to cover the actual cost of advanced cardiac interventions," explained Dr. Prathap Kumar N., organising chairman of the conference. He pointed out that complex angioplasties frequently demand multiple specialized accessories that easily exceed public insurance ceilings. CSI Kerala Chapter president Dr. Asokan P.K. noted that the high price of new hardware threatens to make basic coronary interventions inaccessible to thousands.
Hospital re-use is neither novel nor undocumented. In 2017, the Cardiological Society of India released a detailed consensus document titled "Guidance on reuse of cardio-vascular catheters and devices in India." That framework explicitly endorsed the supervised reuse of select hardware, provided hospitals met strict guardrails: identifying eligible equipment, executing validated disinfection and functional tests before insertion, securing specific patient consent, and passing every rupee saved directly to the patient.
"Patient safety must remain paramount. Any proposal for re-use must be supported by scientific evidence, validated sterilisation, functional testing and strict regulatory oversight," Dr. Prathap Kumar said. He called on federal regulators to convene a panel of infection-control specialists, frontline cardiologists, and statutory health authorities to hammer out an evidence-based guideline rather than enforcing an outright freeze.
Beyond the regulatory standoff, the Thiruvananthapuram sessions examined broader clinical shifts in cardiovascular treatment, detailing outcomes from drug-coated balloons, drug-eluting stents, leadless pacemakers, and next-generation cholesterol-lowering therapies. The medical body plans to submit its technical review petition directly to the DGHS later this month.