Access, affordability, and quality are the three major challenges when it comes to the healthcare sector in India. Milan Rao — the President and CEO of GE Healthcare South Asia, and Managing Director of Wipro GE Healthcare — goes one step further to say that only by focusing on these key areas can a company achieve great success in the market.
“It comes down to a few things. Do you have the capability to develop products in India that are suitable for the market, and also for exports? Can you create high-quality products in India that are affordable? This is something we have been doing for the last five years. In fact, we have started to implement a long-term vision to create 100 new products for India and overseas by 2020.”
The latest example of that is Wipro GE Healthcare’s Revolution ACTs, the first CT scanner to be designed in the country, with an aim to make the technology more affordable and accessible to the general public.
“The high quality, but more affordable CT is capable of taking care of more than 90% of all the requirements needed in tier two, three, and four locations across India,” Milan explains. “We are also seeking a lot of customer interest and sales in the metropolitan and tier one towns as well. It’s around 40% lower in cost than a traditional CT and I think that’s a very important factor in that we are addressing the issues of quality, as well as of availability and affordability.”
Another invention that is catering to the challenges of access, affordability, and quality is Wipro GE Healthcare’s Lullaby Warmers. “We had traditionally been importing and selling baby incubators in India but we realised that our competition in the rural areas wasn’t actually the other baby warmers on the market, but a 200-watt lightbulb. So we had to think about how we could create a product that was more affordable than what we were already selling. We came up with the Lullaby Warmer Prime, which is 80-90% cheaper than the high-end incubator that we were importing, and can care for babies that are jaundiced or born in the winter with inadequate access to heating.”
