BANGALORE, India -- After training and working abroad, medtech entrepreneurs are coming back to India with health care solutions to serve the Indian market, especially the country’s poor.
Most Indian medical electronics startups are founded by medical or engineering professionals, many of them trained at Harvard, MIT or Cambridge. After studying and working abroad, this new wave of entrepreneurs has come to India to develop products specifically for the Indian market, especially the country’s poor and underserved.
Their aim is to provide convenient, affordable solutions for the diagnosis and treatment of disease by combining traditional research methodologies with emerging technologies.
What follows is a closer look at how the new technology-driven Indian health care infrastructure is evolving.
About 77 percent of Indians -- 850 million people -- live on less than half a dollar a day. As this poster illustrates, health care is largely unavailable to most since the Indian medical system does not offer primary care services. (Source: Coloribus Archives)
According to the World Health Organization, India ranks near the bottom globally in the availability of hospital beds at 0.9 beds per 1,000. The global average is 2.9 beds.