Fifty breakthrough innovations were showcased at the World Health Care Congress Affordable Health Innovations Exhibits and Awards this year. The event featured a wide range of devices and interventions that are extending lives and improving the quality-of-life dramatically for the very poor. This year’s exhibits included:
- Mobisante’s smartphone/ultrasound device: This phone can collect quality ultrasound images that can then be transmitted to medical centers for analysis.
- Diagnostic’s for All’s postage-stamp sized, paper-based “laboratory.” This device won the top award at the event.
- Rockland County, New York’s, low-cost, and easy-to-implement cognitive fitness program for seniors.
- The Solar Ear: A solar-powered hearing aid. The Re-Mission video-game, which helps teen cancer patients manage their disease better. Battery-powered
- Speaking Books that combine colorful graphics, well-crafted health messages, and an audio track to bring health literacy to the illiterate.
See the complete list of exhibitors, view their abstracts and posters, and make comments here.
Cheap, High-Quality, and Profitable
It’s not just remarkable how many of these innovations are finally making their way to the poor, but some of these ventures are actually profitable as well. Sustainability, after all, is a virtue for any organization.
In India, LifeSpring offers high quality maternal care at below market rates. A doctor’s consultation fee at LifeSpring is just Rs. 75 (U.S. $1.60). The all-inclusive price for a normal delivery in the general ward is between Rs. 2,000 to 4,000 (US $43 to $86). The chain is growing at an impressive rate: The first hospital was opened in 2007 and nine LifeSpring hospitals are now operating. LifeSpring’s success comes from specialization, high volume, and “paraskilling” – breaking down selected skills into tasks that can be done by lower level workers. The same tactics have enabled Aravind Eye Hospitals and heart surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty’s Narayana Hrudayalaya hospitals to offer high-quality, sophisticated medical procedures at a fraction of what they cost elsewhere.
Another important point about LifeSpring is that it regards its patients as customers, not charity cases. The hospital’s average customer earns $2-4 a day, but they demand “dignified maternal care,” according to the company’s poster.
Nontheless, given that approximately 100,000 women die in childbirth every year in India, and most of those women give birth without a skilled medical professional anywhere nearby, let alone in the room, LifeSpring and others like it are addressing a critical need.
High Tech and Clean Water Big Themes
A number of other Affordable Health Innovations Exhibit and Awards participants used technical innovations to bring much needed high technology – such as ultrasound and microscopy – to the poor, many of whom live in remote locations far from even the most basic health services. The expansion and further development of telemedicine will be crucial in addressing more of the very poor’s health needs. An honorable mention award went to the CellScope, which is extending telemedicine to diagnostic microscopy by merging a microscope with a cellphone. Postdoctoral scholar Erik Douglas of the University of California, Berkley, invented the device.
Contaminated water is an increasingly important health issue for the poor, and is a leading cause of death. Innovations around safe water included a chip to detect cholera in water that costs a few dollars, an emergency water contamination alert system, and the Tulip Siphon Filter from Safe Water Today, which also received an honorable mention at the awards presentation.
Other exhibitors focused on practical means of health care delivery to migrant indigenous populations, training for health care providers and public health issues such as violence prevention. The World Health Innovation Summit ran concurrently with the exhibit, and featured talks on innovations in health insurance and health care financing, care delivery, exploiting wireless networks, call centers and health care education. Speakers included some of the world’s most successful affordable health innovators. (See speakers and their bios here.)
Muhammad Yunus on Grameen Health Initiatives
Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Laureate and Founder and Managing Director, Grameen Bank gave a closing speech. Yunus is credited with founding the microfinance movement, and he described how “health care naturally became part of our work.” Health care problems are particularly disruptive for the poor, who can be bankrupted by a relatively minor problem. Grameen Bank has also helped its borrowers to improve their basic living conditions by encouraging them to built latrines and plant and consume vegetables among other things.
Grameen currently operates about 50 health care clinics and is trying to build Grameen Healthcare into a model health care delivery system for the very poor. That ideal includes an affordable health insurance model. One of the biggest challenges, Yunus said, has been getting doctors to remain in the villages where their services are so desperately needed. “We can’t get the doctors to stay,” Yunus said. Instead, telemedicine will be employed to connect patients to physicians in urban areas.
Grameen has also launched the Grameen Caledonian Nursing College, which is headed by Dr. Barbara Parfitt, Dean of the School of Nursing Midwifery and Community Health at Glasgow Caledonian University. The College will not only bring more health care practitioners into the poor communities, it will also improve the lives of families whose daughters become nurses. “One nurse changes the whole family,” Yunus said.
