In this paper, we are interested in the strong convergence properties of the Ninomiya-Victoir scheme which is known to exhibit weak convergence with order 2. We prove strong convergence with order $1/2$. This study is aimed at analysing the use of this scheme either at each level or only at the finest level of a multilevel Monte Carlo estimator: indeed, the variance of a multilevel Monte Carlo estimator is related to the strong error between the two schemes used on the coarse and fine grids at each level. Recently, Giles and Szpruch proposed a scheme permitting to construct a multilevel Monte Carlo estimator achieving the optimal complexity $O\left(ε^{-2}\right)$ for the precision $ε$. In the same spirit, we propose a modified Ninomiya-Victoir scheme, which may be strongly coupled with order $1$ to the Giles-Szpruch scheme at the finest level of a multilevel Monte Carlo estimator. Numerical experiments show that this choice improves the efficiency, since the order $2$ of weak convergence of the Ninomiya-Victoir scheme permits to reduce the number of discretization levels.