For the last about 2 years that iKURE has been working on technology solutions for healthcare delivery, we have straddled 2 very different customer segments – rural and urban. And it has surprised us that opportunities for advances in rural healthcare delivery exist through the use of a humble technology platform.
Why I used the term ‘under-served market’ in the title is because I wanted to highlight that rural people also pay out of pocket for their healthcare needs. Their ability to get quality healthcare is limited by Access and Affordability. Most good hospitals are built in urban centres and there also you will witness a huge difference in healthcare facilities available in metros and towns/cities. From my own healthcare experience I have realized that it takes many factors to create a quality healthcare system – Doctors, Nurses, Technicians, Engineers, Billers, Security, Waste Management, Medical Suppliers, Equipment suppliers and maintenance, IT etc. and many other supportive institutions like municipality, banks, electricity dept. among many others. And add to this the problem of high rate of attrition in medical and non-medical staff. So let’s admit that it’s not economically feasible to replicate an urban healthcare delivery system for rural setups in the near future. But rural masses deserve the same standards, yet access is limited because they need to travel a lot to avail of the services of hospitals in the urban setup. Affordability is another issue because one another aspect of the urban healthcare system or a hospital is that it is capital intensive and most of the costs are passed on to the patients. For city-based patients it is within reach because per-capita income level in metros/cities is much higher than those for towns and villages.
In such kind of circumstances, the easiest we can do is to enable patient in a village to seek health services from a city-based consultant without having to travel to the city and at a fraction of a cost of what it would be for a city-based patient. At iKure we leverage this through a hub-and-spoke model. For more information on this, please read the post ‘Health for remotest of areas – the iKure way’.
From our field experiments, we have come to a working model which is supported by Corporate Social Responsibility funds. So while the technology creates Access, the Affordability is taken care of by the CSR grant which subsidizes the treatment costs. It’s heartening to see how such partnerships create difference in the lives of our countrymen.
The scope of this model to radically change the rural healthcare delivery process is immense. Our concept is basically to create a technology platform to enable a rural doctor/health worker to collaborate with a city-based specialist doctor to deliver care to the village-based patient. In this process, we are able to uplift the confidence and credibility of the village-based doctor and significantly improve his decision-making abilities regarding his patients’ treatment. Our health partner also spends their resources in training these health workers/doctors to bring them up to the common communication level with the city-based doctor. The CSR partner funds the medicines, consultations and other health costs for the target community. But as a group, it is our endeavour to make the whole model self-sustaining by letting the community take ownership of the whole system.
As we make progress, we would like to explore opportunities where a fairly good number of spokes or village health centres/clinics are technology-enabled and these are connected to a series of specialized centres to provide quality healthcare to a larger set of population. Many more innovators can leverage this network, for example insurers, pharmaceutical companies, low-cost diagnostic device manufacturers, research institutions etc. As I said in the beginning of this post, there are a number of factors which contribute to make an urban healthcare delivery system. We are in the process of creating an ecosystem of partners and experts who will together create a rural healthcare delivery system which will materialize our vision of delivering quality healthcare services to rural people at a price point affordable to them.
If you share our vision, or you are an innovator passionate about this sector, please contact us at contactus@ikure.in
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