Doctors at AIIMS, New Delhi, have directed multiple patients to a private vendor for a brain implant, bypassing standard procurement norms intended to shield patients from medical suppliers and exposing them to extra costs.
In each case, doctors at the AIIMS neuroradiology department gave patients or their caregivers the vendor’s name and phone number, instructing them to directly purchase a flow diverter — a stent-like device used to treat brain aneurysms, a disorder of blood vessels.
Standard protocols require the hospital's stores to procure medicines, devices and equipment and charge patients, senior faculty have told The Telegraph. Referring patients to vendors would breach these norms intended to discourage direct transactions between patients and vendors, they said.
Receipts shared by patients or caregivers with this newspaper show that the vendor, Brainwave Medical Technologies, charged ₹596,550 plus taxes for each flow diverter bought between 2022 and 2025.
This price aligns with a pricing letter from an AIIMS official to Brainwave dated January 27, 2018, which set a unit rate of ₹596,550 plus taxes for the device for the period ending January 26, 2019. The letter also stated that the price would "remain valid until the finalisation of the next tender".
However, receipts and other documents indicate AIIMS patients paid ₹121,000 more than those at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST) in Thiruvananthapuram — another central government hospital — for the same device.
Receipts from Brainwave and a 2023 price list from SCTIMST show the maximum retail price of the flow diverter is around ₹11.90 lakh. While SCTIMST procured each unit for ₹475,000 plus taxes in 2023, patients at AIIMS paid ₹596,550 plus taxes during this period.
Faculty members estimate that three to four patients at AIIMS require flow diverters each month.
Six patients or their caregivers interviewed by this newspaper said they were unaware of the hospital’s procurement protocols. “How do we question doctors? We did what we were told,” said the caregiver of a patient treated in 2024.
“Patients come to AIIMS with a sense of trust — such a practice is tantamount to a betrayal of trust,” a senior faculty member said. Faculty members who spoke for this report requested anonymity to avoid appearing critical of colleagues.
“Asking patients to buy directly from vendors exposes them to non-transparent transactions that fall outside the scope of institutional audits or records,” the faculty member said. “Only in exceptional cases — typically when a medicine is unavailable in our stores — do we ask patients to purchase it themselves. And never for an expensive medical device.”
Email queries from this newspaper to the AIIMS director and the head of neuroradiology seeking their response to these concerns have gone unanswered.
A faculty member familiar with AIIMS procurement processes cited examples from the cardiology, neurosurgery and ophthalmology departments, where “package systems” are in place. Under this system, departments negotiate with vendors, procure what is needed, and patients make any due payments directly to AIIMS’s account.
The faculty member also flagged the January 2018 pricing letter as containing “unacceptable language”. Under institutional rules, prices are fixed for defined periods and may be extended with approval, but cannot remain valid indefinitely.
The receipts show that patients treated between 2022 and 2025 were charged the rate fixed in 2018. “This raises the question of why AIIMS did not seek a price revision over such a long period,” the faculty member said.
The faculty member said the price differential between two central government hospitals also contravenes what is known as the “fall clause” — a provision requiring that if the price of a device falls in one government hospital, it must be adjusted accordingly in others.