Facilitating Market Entry for Technologies
in Rural Health
– An ICTPH Strategy Paper
Neil Parikh, ARIJIT SARKAR
Proposal & Introduction
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Neil Parikh is currently pursuing the joint MD/MBA program at the Keck School at the University of Southern California and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is majoring in healthcare management. He has an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California, where he majored in biology and journalism. His range of experience in the area of health access includes research in India investigating barriers preventing patients’ access to HIV medication and work for a non-profit organization that is developing methods to overcome cultural barriers. His areas of interest are healthcare access and healthcare systems in emerging markets. Arijit Sarkar is Vice-President, Health Care Solutions at ICTPH. His primary interest is to invest in and provide support to socially relevant and sustainable business models, with a particular focus on nascent and early stage entrepreneurships. He has two years of financial modeling experience. His previous role was that of a quantitative research associate at Lehman Brothers, where he built models of liquidity in public equity markets. He has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay. |
Proposal
The IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health (ICTPH) provides end-to-end service for public and private companies seeking to develop and/or introduce healthcare technology, particularly diagnostics, for rural settings. This encompasses market entry consulting, regulatory navigation as well as field testing through contract research organization model. ICTPH’s role in financing, which is also an important aspect of the technology development process, is discussed separately.
Introduction
Development and promotion of healthcare interventions via technology are a clearly stated objective of ICTPH. Of several different kinds of interventions, diagnosis technologies are of particular interest to the organization.
Diagnostic testing till now has been mainly restricted to a laboratory setup, and requires trained staff, who are mostly not available at remote places. Point of care diagnosis (PCD) techniques can be utilised to alleviate this situation. Diagnostics which are not only easy to use, but require little or no training and give accurate results instantaneously, will be instrumental towards providing improved healthcare. At the primary level, PCD technologies aid the healthcare professional to assess a patient’s condition more quickly and accurately. This in turn will ensure timely guidance and interventions beneficial for the patients. From the point of view of infrastructure, it will help reduce the burden on secondary and tertiary care centres by helping restrict the flow of patients to only those who actually require higher care.
Fig.1 shows the different stages of diagnostics development, and areas where ICTPH hopes to contribute in the same.
Figure 1: Stages of diagnostic development 1
1 Mabey et al. "Diagnostics for the Developing World." Nature. 2004. (Continue reading)
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