Simon Denyer/Washington Post - A medical technician demonstrates the use of Perfint's robotic arm to position a needle to take a biopsy from a patient's lung. Healthcare products being designed in India promise to revolutionize the industry.
BANGALORE, India — It is a simple idea that could revolutionize the science of health care and turn accepted norms about innovation on their head.
Instead of designing health-care products in the West and then trying to adapt and simplify those products for sale in fast-growing emerging markets, Indian and American companies are increasingly realizing that products designed and built in India will naturally be better suited for market conditions here.
(Simon Denyer/Washington Post) - A medical technician prepares a patient's blood samples for testing in a portable medical diagnostic product -- a \"lab in a box\" -- developed by ReaMetrix.
Scientists based in India, drawing on global technologies, are creating what proponents say are simple, robust and cost-effective diagnostic products that will make profits in India and can ultimately find markets — and help to contain health-care costs — from Africa to Europe, from China to the United States.
At the forefront are small companies such as ReaMetrix in the Indian city of Bangalore. It is rolling out a “lab in a box” that promises to bring diagnostic testing for a variety of ailments — HIV, malaria, diabetes, arthritis — cheaply and quickly, right to the patient. Its founders hope the product can one day transform health care in the United States.
There are others, too, such as Perfint in Chennai, which is using a robotic arm to help perform quick, cost-effective biopsies, to diagnose and then treat lung, liver and other soft-tissue cancers.
“You don’t really need to look to the West for innovation,” said Bala Manian, an Indian-born American and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who set up ReaMetrix. “If you frame the problem differently, in a local context, that is an innovation opportunity.”
Ultimately, though, ReaMetrix aims to use India as the research center and proving ground but find a market — and reshape the health-care industry — in the United States.
“Fundamentally, although I am born and raised in India, I am an American,” Manian said. “I really see this as an opportunity to transform the paradigm in how health care is managed in the developed economies, particularly the United States.”
Indian approach
Products designed in India start with a common set of assumptions. Power supplies in India are notoriously unreliable, so products are designed to run on voltages from 80 to 230, or even off a car battery. It isn’t enough for them to work in an air-conditioned hospital; they need to function in dusty conditions and summer temperatures that can reach 12o degrees.
Many Western-made products depend on costly disposable items thrown away after each test, but that business model is too expensive in India. Instead, cheap labor means that sterilizing and reusing components is more cost-effective here.
Indeed, it is the intense pressure on health-care costs in India that drives the innovative process in a different direction than in the United States.
“It is a very different market here,” said S. Nandakumar, Perfint’s chief executive. “It is not supported by insurance companies. Here everybody pays from their own pocket or the government’s pocket.” That, he said, makes it tough to survive in the Indian market. “So we are leveraging Indian market requirements, saying if something succeeds here, it should succeed elsewhere.”
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