Interventions to Improve Child Utilization of Government Health Insurance in Rajasthan - RCT

The Government of Rajasthan (GoR) launched the BSBY program 4 years ago to increase equity in health care access, utilization, and outcomes. The program pays hospitals to provide free secondary and tertiary care to poor households. Analyses of administrative data and surveys of BSBY-eligible households financed by a CaTCH pilot grant show that (1) service utilization is low among children, particularly young girls; (2) hospitals still charge patients out-of-pocket; and (3) awareness of the BSBY program is low, especially among women. This large scale experiment on the demand and supply side will examine whether they can reduce hospital charges, increase utilization among children, girls in particular, and ensure government transfers are spent most effectively. The demand-side information intervention will be a phone-based campaign that will test overall impact on utilization, as well as the impact of targeting women. The supply-side information intervention will collect information from patients on out-of-pocket charges at BSBY hospitals to generate hospital-specific “report cards” for the GoR to strengthen its monitoring.