Sujay Santra's mission to provide an innovative healthcare service system to rural areas
Would you have the courage to leave behind a comfortable life in big MNC to chase a dream full of uncertainties? That’s exactly what Sujay Santra, the founder of iKure, did. Unhappy with the way his life was going, he resigned from Oracle – one of the biggest software and hardware systems companies – and got into his own business. “Although I had a very decent and satisfying life, I had an identity crisis. I asked ‘Where do I see myself in five, ten years down the line?” and the vision forward was not very satisfying. Then I started to think about how could I change many people’s lives; it triggered something in me and I started to feel I needed to do something”.
The reply came after a short trip from Kharagpur to Habra in 2009, when Sujay was still working for Oracle. Wearing his usual formals, he boarded the vendor’s wagon on a local train, loaded with vegetables, chickens and baskets. The place was full, messed up, and Sujay found himself sandwiched between hundreds of people, trying to stretch his hand just to hold on something. Having reached the station after two hours and taking a taxi to the countryside, he met around 50 locals aiming to introduce a new technology, so they could use it as an interface to connect rural places to the hospital. They said “If you can really do this it would be great”, and Sujay could see tears in their eyes. Going back home that day, he felt as having met a new purpose in life. “Even though I was extremely tired, sweaty and fully messed up, I was satisfied from within. I knew that doing it would be an uphill task, but if we could do this it would be extremely gratifying. It was obviously my destiny and I wasn’t thinking of the consequences”.
In India, nearly 600 million poor in rural and urban areas do not have access to quality health care that is affordable. Overall healthcare expenditure in India is amongst the lowest globally at 4%, less than half of the global average of 9.7%. Furthermore, less than 10% of India’s population has any form of health insurance cover and for those living in remote areas, total healthcare cost is much higher. In case of any primary healthcare requirement, a rural worker has a couple of options: go to a local clinic which have uncertified doctors with limited medicine knowledge; or go to Burdwan District in West Bengal. But having to walk more than 20 km and maybe find that doctors are not available was a gamble.
Rural people in India usually go to checkups along family and friends. They have travel and food costs and need to put their livelihood on hold in many cases. The image of pregnant women or an elder fellow walking barefoot a couple of kilometers under the hot sun to reach the main road is atypical. Buses are infrequent, with one bus in every two hours and in most cases overcrowded, which they have to take to see a doctor in the nearest town.
The iKure way for medical diagnosis
While working at the software industry, Sujay used to see how both technology industry and India are developing so fast, but the same is still not happening in rural areas. “We did a lot of researches of how come this particular thing could be changed, as we cannot build up hospitals overnight to solve the huge gap within the healthcare sector. Then, we came up with this idea of making technology become a platform for quality, good, affordable and accessible healthcare services for the common man”.
After a year of research, in 2010 he ventured into rural health care services with the creation of iKure Techsoft and a health monitoring system to connect patients with doctors. The first initial seed investment came in 2010 from the West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Limited (WEBEL), a Government of West Bengal Enterprise in the form of soft loan and equity. Then, in 2011, iKure received funding from Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) fund, and in 2013 they received angel funding from the Intellecap Impact Investment Network. Recently, they have received an investment from Village Capital and another from the Centre of Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) of the Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad.
The company has established Rural Health Centers (RHCs) in the states of West Bengal and Orissa that are armed with doctors available seven days a week, pharmacists dispensing only accredited medicines, and health officers recording data for all activity at the centers. They have setup four health centers so far, which attracts more than three hundred patients per day. The other four centers will be running by the end of November.
The iKure team has developed a patent-pending software platform called Wireless Health Incident Monitoring System (WHIMS). This device is designed to work in areas with sporadic electricity and internet. WHIMS allows for centralized monitoring of key metrics such as doctor’s attendance, treatment prescribed, footfall, pharmacy stock management, etc. and also enables seamless communication with urban hospitals for consultation or escalation. The concept of “health worker” was then introduced by iKure, where local youths and midwives are trained on medical science and technology to make mobile clinics operational everyday and help doctors for first hand information & act accordingly.
iKure system works this way: using WHIMS product, health workers in the rural areas can connect to doctors for the first level of diagnosis. They take relevant information from the patient and connect, on a real-time basis, using normal broadband/data card lines, to an enlisted doctor at the hospital; the doctor, then, advises relevant clinical information. On the basis of various information made available to the doctor, they can decide on asking more relevant questions, additional reports etc. and prescribing proper medicine or general advice.
The WHIM system brings benefits such as better optimization of doctors – which are very scarce in rural areas -, usage of technology to help patients & their cases to be made available to specialists at tertiary hospitals in the cities, help pharmacy companies with data for inventory management & molecular research and help the government with critical data to help plan various health programs for better results.
Challenges
How to build a telemedicine facility based on internet online service, which requires 1 to 2 Mbps, when at remote places the speed might be only 30 Kbps to 50 Kbps? “We understood that those challenges we faced came from a bottom-up approach, meaning that we understood the challenges from the ground and made up very simple solutions. Rural areas need a lot of investment in sophisticated technology and also skilled people to deal with it”, says Sujay. They also needed doctors to be present in real time and, as iKure deals with healthcare service, it should follow basic measures.
That is why they tied up with several healthcare centers and NOGs, such as Nanavati Hospital from Mumbai, AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) from New Delhi, Mission Hospital from Durgapur and ACOIN (Association of Community Ophthalmologists of India). iKure signed with Sanjiban Hospital, Howrah, to setup Rural Health Centers in order to deliver quality primary care across Remote Bengal. Now, patients are paying Rs 50 to 100 instead of Rs 200 to 400 for the same kind of service provided in town.
iKure’s mission is to set up at least 12 centers of their own by the end of this year. Until 2014, they would want to impact 10 million patients, help at least one hundred doctors and 100 pharma companies to manage their inventory, distribution and molecular research and also help the National Rural Health Mission to plan the strategy to tackle endemic diseases and vaccination programs.
“We interact with people to understand their difficulties and how can our technology and innovation bring in a change to their lives. They face many challenges and I have seen similar issues happening in my family too. When I go to remote villages and see their smiles it brings me a huge dose of motivation and inspiration – we have lunch together sitting on the floor, and I don’t feel like having any kind of formality because, after all, they are part of my extended family.”
Recognitions
iKure is undoubtedly a leader in the Social Entrepreneurship space. Their model and innovative approach to address the healthcare needs of the rural population has been recognized both at the national and international level: in 2012 they were selected as Top 2 Social Entrepreneurship company from Action for India and got among the top 17 finalists of Samsung Innovation Quotient; in the same year, Sujay Santra received a nomination from emTech India for Technology Review 35 and also Frost & Sullivan India Healthcare Excellence Awards as “Health initiative of the Year”, which recognized iKure’s outstanding performance and the relentless efforts of its team. In 2013, they were awarded with Indian STEPs & Business Incubators’ Association (ISBA) Jury Award, a special recognition from the Jury to the innovativeness.
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