India is the second largest country in the world in terms of population. India has also a large number of villages; more than 600.000 villages with poor transport infrastructure making movement of goods and people extremely difficult.
Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is the leading cause of preventable infant blindness worldwide. India has the largest concentration of blind people in the world, 1 out of 3. Over 8% of 27 million births each year are at risk of this potentially blinding condition. The ratio of inhabitants to ophthalmologist is around 100,000:1. There's no way the number of qualified physicians will grow to match the need anytime soon. The challenge is to screen 250.000 infants a day. This problem requires a fast and efficient solution for screening infants especially in the rural areas where expertise is lacking.
Mobile Broadband
The whidespread availability of mobile networks and the steady growth of Mobile broadband are opening unexpected doors for fast, efficient and societal innovations.
Mobile broadband technology provides the possibility to transport data securely, conveniently, faster and while traveling.
A potential solution has been tested. The Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology has partnered with a software development company i2i TeleSolutions in Bangalore, and developed the solution and launched a pilot project. The solution consists of the availability of a portable (albeit in a van) retinal camera with a unique image capture design ideally suited for newborns. This camera allows trained technicians, not medical experts, to capture images and upload them (sometimes while traveling between remote locations) via a Mobile broadband dongle data card. The images and data are uploaded to a remote server. Once uploaded the images can be accessed and viewed by an ophthalmologist - who could be thousands miles away - using an IPHONE, an IPAD or any other PC.
Feedback and corrective measures can then be provided back to the technician via the secure server. The window of opportunity for treatment is only a few days (72 hours). This scale of screening in such large numbers can only be possible through telemedicine using Mobile Broadband networks.
This model has now been adopted as part of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in the state of Karnataka in India and is being deployed across eighteen health centers across six rural districts.
This is a typical case of reverse innovation, coined by Vijay Govindarajan (see also the post of Vijay below for more details). You can find all ingredients of Clayton Christensen for disruptive innovations; all ingredients of any game changer in serving unserved, undemanding group and identifying unsatisfied job-to-be-done; all ingredients of shared value, by creating economic value while at the same time creating societal benefits, introduced by Michael Porter.
References:
i2itelesolutions
Vijay Govindarajan, HBR blog
Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is the leading cause of preventable infant blindness worldwide. India has the largest concentration of blind people in the world, 1 out of 3. Over 8% of 27 million births each year are at risk of this potentially blinding condition. The ratio of inhabitants to ophthalmologist is around 100,000:1. There's no way the number of qualified physicians will grow to match the need anytime soon. The challenge is to screen 250.000 infants a day. This problem requires a fast and efficient solution for screening infants especially in the rural areas where expertise is lacking.
Mobile Broadband
The whidespread availability of mobile networks and the steady growth of Mobile broadband are opening unexpected doors for fast, efficient and societal innovations.
Mobile broadband technology provides the possibility to transport data securely, conveniently, faster and while traveling.
A potential solution has been tested. The Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology has partnered with a software development company i2i TeleSolutions in Bangalore, and developed the solution and launched a pilot project. The solution consists of the availability of a portable (albeit in a van) retinal camera with a unique image capture design ideally suited for newborns. This camera allows trained technicians, not medical experts, to capture images and upload them (sometimes while traveling between remote locations) via a Mobile broadband dongle data card. The images and data are uploaded to a remote server. Once uploaded the images can be accessed and viewed by an ophthalmologist - who could be thousands miles away - using an IPHONE, an IPAD or any other PC.
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| i2itelesolutions |
This model has now been adopted as part of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in the state of Karnataka in India and is being deployed across eighteen health centers across six rural districts.
This is a typical case of reverse innovation, coined by Vijay Govindarajan (see also the post of Vijay below for more details). You can find all ingredients of Clayton Christensen for disruptive innovations; all ingredients of any game changer in serving unserved, undemanding group and identifying unsatisfied job-to-be-done; all ingredients of shared value, by creating economic value while at the same time creating societal benefits, introduced by Michael Porter.
References:
i2itelesolutions
Vijay Govindarajan, HBR blog
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