Enhance ReadabilityOn an otherwise reasonable evening in July, over 1000 people packed an auditorium in Boulder Colorado for the culmination of the Unreasonable Institute. They came to watch 12 ventures, tackling some of the world’s greatest challenges, take the stage and share their plans to help define progress in our time. This is one of those talks.
The entrepreneurs in this video are Aloka Singh and Dr. Monika Puri of Chaupal. They are building a healthcare network to serve rural communities in India, through a mobile health clinic and temporary health camps that set up in villages. They have provided healthcare access to 650,000 people in India, for less than a dollar per patient… and they’re just getting started.
What is the urgent social or environmental need you’re addressing?
One of the most pressing issues of Indian society today is the lack of quality, affordable healthcare. 75% of doctors are based in cities, while 70% of patients reside in underserved areas. India faces the world’s heaviest disease burden, ranging from infectious diseases to cancer and hypertension. The public health system is overwhelmed and under-resourced, and the private health clinics are too expensive and located in town centers away from where most of the women, children and elderly population. We are working to make a lasting impact on improving mother and child care and eliminate needless blindness by providing affordable mother, child and eye care.
What is your solution to this need? Describe your business strategy.
We envision a chain of low-cost, 20-bed hospitals networked with the very successful services we currently provide.
Already, we have mobile wellness clinics and community outreach health camps. Our “clinic on wheels” provides primary care and diagnostics services. This solves the access problem and generates greater health awareness by taking healthcare to the doorstep. Our free community outreach health camps offer specialist services and increase health awareness among women, children and elderly, who often do not visit a doctor.
These services will all increase patient flow to our hospitals.
At the hospital, we will focus on critically-needed procedures for maternal care, child care and eye care. We can provide quality, low-cost deliveries and cataract operations, and generate high-volume patient turnover since these are the most prevalent care areas. By recruiting local talent, standardizing processes, and keeping capital expenditure low, we will keep overall costs low. We will transfer savings to patients and charge them tiered prices. We project reaching 80 patients daily at the hospital and INR 12 million in first year revenues.
