Sophie was born without fluid in her inner ears. Susanne, her mother, recalls that she wanted to get answers to her thousands of questions when the surgeons recommended that Sophie should receive a cochlear implant. Today, the five-year-old Sophie attends kindergarten and is an active child.
Discovering your child is deaf or has hearing loss can be painful. But the only good news is the shrinking cost of cochlear implants, an electronic medical device which could be a lifetime cure for deafness.
The device bypasses the damaged hair cells of the inner ear to provide sound signals to the brain and can be done on babies as young as nine-months-old up to adults and older people.
In the last ten years, the prices of cochlear implants in India has come down by over 40%. "The entry price of cochlear implant was about Rs 8.5 lakh per device which has now fallen to Rs 5 lakh per device," said Dr Ingeborg Hochmair, co-founder and CEO of hearing implant company, MED-EL, which produced the world's first microelectronic multi-channel cochlear implant forty years back.
Commenting on the latest move by government's price watchdog, National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority, on curbing prices of stents, the company suggested that the ear implants should be excluded from the price controls. "The policy of price control should be applicable for passive medical devices such as knee implants, dental implants or stents. However, it is not suggestive for active medical devices such as cochlear implants," said Tejinder Singh, director at MED-EL India. He further explained that the cochlear surgery requires extensive consultation, rehabilitation charges apart from doctor's fee. "Also, there are very few surgeons, about 100 across the country, who know the implantation procedure. Hence, price curbs on such implants would be deteriorating for patients," Singh said.
It is estimated that out of the 60 million people who are suffering from hearing impairments in India, around 4 million children in India could benefit from receiving a cochlear implant. However, Austrian medical device maker MED-EL which is selling the implants since last 40 years, sells only about 1200 implants in India every year. "In India, about 2000 implants are sold every year from which 60 per cent of implants are made by us," said Singh. Over the last decade, owing to the high prices, complicated surgery over infants and ignorance, company has sold implant solutions to just 6,000 children in India.
