Category — Healthcare

Catholic healthcare organization, Ascension Health Alliance runs the largest American faith-based nonprofit medical care system. In an unusual partnership, it is helping set up a 140-bed multi-specialty hospital on Grand Cayman Island, which will provide services such as open-heart/bypass surgery, angioplasty, heart-valve replacement, cancer treatment, bone-marrow transplant, nuclear medicine, organ transplant and orthopedics.

The partner is India’s Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals (NH) led by Chairman and Managing Director Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, a cardiovascular surgeon with extensive experience in providing high-quality/low-cost healthcare at medical facilities in India. NH was rated among the 50 Most Innovative by Fast Company Magazine in a global survey. Narayana Hrudayalaya’s operations, include the world’s most prolific cardiac hospital, where the average open-heart surgery runs less than $2,000, a third or less what it costs elsewhere in India and a fraction of what it costs in the United States. The organization also offers eye, trauma, and cancer care across 14 cities in India. Shetty was honored by India’s President with the Padma Bhushan, among the top awards a civilian can receive.

“Ascension Health has been working with Dr. Shetty for two years to explore ways to adapt his success at providing high-quality healthcare at low cost,” said Anthony R. Tersigni, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ascension Health Alliance. This hospital is part of Cayman Health City, a $2 billion project vision to be built in phases over 15 years on a 200-acre site, and will include a tertiary-care hospital, an educational facility, a biotech park and an assisted living community.

While the officials are not making this claim, many expect that patients from the United States may choose to travel to the Cayman Islands to take advantage of the low cost and high quality  service offered by this hospital

What this means

Innovation from India is lapping at American shores soon.  Smart American companies and executives are already reaching out to India to accelerate their own success in this aspect of frugal innovation and global engineering.

India’s HCL Technologies has signed an engineering and R&D services deal with Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD). BD manufactures and sells medical supplies, devices, laboratory equipment and diagnostic products. The New Jersyey based multinational will focus on creating solutions by leveraging HCL’s capabilities and service expertise like sustenance engineering and product – testing services delivered out of a newly set up Chennai facility, HCL Technologies said in a statement.

According to the Times of India, the new facility is part of BD’s efforts to accelerate R&D innovation to develop new products and markets, achieve time-to-market advantage for its products and enhance operational efficiencies. The facility will be directly managed by BD Singapore. HCL will also conduct product life cycle and design verification studies to support new product development initiatives and product launches for BD in the emerging markets such as India.

What this means

The drive to expand R&D capability in Asia continues. Many of my clients are are in  the medical device business and BD’s move is no surprise.

I recently came across an interesting piece of technology that crossed over from outer space to rural India.

The guideVue system was originally developed by Dr. Sriram Iyengar and his colleagues at the University of Texas – Houston with funding from NASA, who was looking for a better way for astronauts to receive physical care while in space. It was while brainstorming other applications for guideVue that Dr. Iyengar realized that “there is something very common about deep space and the rural areas of earth.” Dr. Iyengar recognized that, just as guideVue can help improve care for an astronaut tens of thousands of miles away from health facilities on Earth, it can improve care for a patient located in a rural area, a hundred miles from the closest facility. Specifically, guideVue can help address problems resulting from the lack of trained physicians in rural areas, the lack of standardized training for frontline rural health providers, and poor internet connectivity.

The software product is a clinical decision support suite that can be used on computers, mobile phones, and tablets. Using this technology, frontline health workers with only basic training will be able to more accurately diagnose and treat patients suffering from a whole range of illnesses or afflictions.

The guideVue system consists of computer program which allows healthcare specialists to easily create complicated decision trees, making use of text, images, video, and audio in a large number of languages (they are in the process of developing support for non-Roman script languages). The program is specifically designed so that anyone with basic knowledge of computers and phones can use it. Once completed, the decision tree can easily be saved in a number of formats so that it can be uploaded onto an iPhone,  Android tablet, or several other devices. It is made to run inside the device itself so that there is no need for internet connectivity, an advantage in remote regions.

Healthcare workers in India learning how to use the guideVue system

Here is a marketing video about broad application of the product.

Covidien , Inc. a US-based manufacturer of medical devices and pharmaceuticals, and an Amritt client, has set up its first research and development center in Hyderabad, India. Business Line reported.

Randell Frazier inagurates Covidien India R&D Center, Rob Frechette, Anurag Asthana, Arjun Sarker in photo from left

“The Indian healthcare devices market is part of our focus on emerging markets. The Hyderabad center will enable us to improve product time to market and create valued-innovation,”  according to Robert Frechette, Vice-President (Engineering Services).

Stating that the company had over 14,000 patents worldwide, with another 12,000 patent applications pending, Frechette told the  Business Standard that  idea to set up an R&D center in India was primarily to support the company’s entire operations globally. Besides generating ideas from here, filing global patents from here was also on the cards, he said.

“We currently spend 5 per cent of our revenues on R&D, which we plan to increase to about 6 per cent starting this year,” he said, adding that the company had so far launched over 100 new products and expected to launch more than 50 products over the next two years.

Apart from designing products to suit local market needs, the R&D unit would utilise India’s huge talent pool to provide a range of engineering services for the company’s medical products business. The company plans to hire over 350 professionals for the centre over the next two years. Some 30 people are already working at the 40,000-square-foot facility.

Mr Arjun Sarker, Managing Director — Indian sub-continent, Covidien, said the business focus in India would be on surgical solutions and medical devices, though the company is strong in the pharmaceuticals business too.

With 46 percent of its $16 billion in annual revenue hailing from foreign shores, Medtronic, the world’s biggest medical devices company has an ambitious goal to develop new and cost-effective products such as pacemakers for the poor, while simultaneously selling its existing ones to the growing middle classes in emerging markets.

The company’s new CEO, 55-year-old Syed Omar Ishrak was raised in South Asia (Bangladesh) and  believes that Medtronic can expand its reach even more, particularly in the emerging markets of India, China and Latin America. “Huge opportunities,” he says. “Huge.” How exactly Ishrak’s globalization strategy will play out remains to be seen according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune last year.

Syed Omar Ishrak, CEO Medtronic

At the Davos World Economic Forum last month, Ishrak, who was recruited from General Electric and has a PhD from King’s College in London,  continued the theme, “One has to be realistic about affordability in the under-served segment,” he said adding that the new generation of simpler devices should be five to 10 times cheaper than current high-specification products.

“To accelerate healthcare access one has to think about disruptive methods — disruptive technology and disruptive delivery mechanisms,” he said. While the work is still at an early stage, Ishrak has already identified heart pacemakers as the most likely area for initial research and development.

“I’d like to challenge all our businesses to start thinking this way but the area where we are furthest ahead is perhaps pacemakers, where we’re thinking of real disruption in terms of cost and simplicity,” he said.

What this means

At my company, Amritt, we have been advising our clients to look at emerging markets such as India, in exactly this manner not only in medical devices but in many other sectors that affect consumers. I had the good fortune to get to know the late legendary Professory C.K. Prahalad of the University  (the man who first became famous for coining the term “core competence”).  “CK” as he was know to all friends and acquaintances later wrote the ground-breaking “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” where he pointed out dozens of examples of profitable business models that address wallet sizes different from the American middle class.

It is good to see that Medtronic has aspirations to address the needs of consumers  beyond the richest 1 billion global citizens. They are early in their journey, but doubtless the GE and Bangladesh heritage will carry Ishrak’s vision. We will watch this closely.