| |February 20189CIOReviewpopulation is under debt, and a third is pushed into extreme poverty due to catastrophic healthcare expenses a rough measure of the quantum of India's lost opportunity. · Is India not fueling its innova-tion prowess to overthrow one of its biggest developmental roadblock the health of her people? The answer is sadly in the affirmative. Sparingly and selectively, as evident from India's start-up base in 2017 a direct reflection on the direction the nation is taking. NASSCOM's Start-up study for 2017 reported a paltry 6 per cent of those in health-tech against a whopping 55 per cent in travel-hospitality/food-tech sec-tors. Most health-tech start-ups di-rectly target urban and semi-urban consumers, suitably informed and well-off to indulge in preventive healthcare via diagnostics and fit-ness-monitoring apps. These exactly cater to the `time and convenience' need of this segment. The urban and rural poor along with middle-class households have remained largely untouched by the health-tech in-novation wave. Their dual need is accessibility and affordability. This is India's `Last Mile Challenge' in healthcare. Topology along with lack of information and infrastruc-ture are major impediments for timely delivery of health services to one and all. Innovation and tech-nology targeted here would change India's story, making a remarkable impact right at the grassroots, and in pulling up India's latent potential.The game changerscumchange agentsThis decade saw mobile apps and digital platforms that changed the game in their fields. A few recent ones have the potential to bring about a societal change in addition to being game changers. eVIN is an excellent example in the latter category. It addresses the challenges in managing logistics and the cold-chain for distribution of vaccines. India has presented a stellar example to the world in her resolve, policy-making and imple-mentation of vaccination drives to fight diseases. India is also the larg-est vaccine-manufacturer. Yet, she is home to one-third of the world's unimmunized children. Much of this is to do with the tyranny of distance and terrain faced by health work-ers to procure and maintain stocks, to prevent shortages in remote and isolated areas within the country. More complexity is thrown in by the virtue of vaccines being biologicals. They have a short shelf-life. Through eVIN, the Government of India is working towards digitiz-ing information on vaccine stocks across more than 27,000 cold chain points. Inventory can now be tracked in real-time via its smartphone app. SIM-enabled sensors allow tem-perature monitoring to ensure po-tency of vaccines during storage and transfer. eVIN's full-blown execu-tion will have a wide-scale impact positively affecting lives of 30 mil-lion pregnant women and 27 million newborns annually.Another example of an app aim-ing to increase access to cardiac care in rural India comes from the private sector. Uber Diagnostics is working together with NGOs to connect pri-mary health care clinics in far-flung rural sites within India to cardiac specialists in big cities through their Cardiotrack platform. An ECG re-corded through the portable Car-diotrack device saves considerable cost. More importantly, it enables timely detection and action for car-diac emergencies. Heart health is no longer an urban issue. The Indian Council of Medical Research recent-ly reported an epidemiological tran-sition in the health profile of India in the last two decades. More Indi-ans now die of non-communicable diseases of the heart or brain than infections or nutritional deficiencies. Several such tech-enabled health platforms are being developed and deployed around the world that In-dian innovators and investors can derive inspiration from. For ex-ample, the Familia mobile app is being extensively used by health workers in Tanzania to reduce maternal mortality by increasing contraceptives prevalence. Mobile and web-based technol-ogy, and data analytics will tre-mendously help India achieve her sustainable development goals in health. It is imperative now that the government facilitates the `health for all' vision by issuing policies that will encourage private sector to pursue innovation in health technology for a large-scale impact on the population. That will make Bharat Ayushmaan. (The author is thankful to Ms. Man-ishree Bhattacharya of NASSCOM for sharing useful data on India's start-up ecosystem.)
<
Page 8 |
Page 10 >