Solving for the future: Precision, quality & accessible healthcare

At the forefront of digital innovation is technology-enabled healthcare, which is designed to revolve around people rather than places and builds upon preventive, predictive, and personalized health to enable timely and affordable preventive healthcare, precision diagnosis, and treatment to all. Raghavendra VS, Head – Sales, GE HealthCare South Asia elaborates on the importance of technology to develop holistic solutions in healthcare.

- Pratima H

What are the key challenges that need to be addressed in the HealthTech industry?

In our country, with its large geography and tough terrain, it’s impossible for people to move around, transport themselves and get access to healthcare. It is important to design solutions that are affordable in nature and think of how we make them more accessible. The physical nature of how you can house this equipment in locations that are challenged on power space and most importantly the skill needed for operating.

We do have a team that is focused on helping customers in education and competency-building measures across the journey in healthcare diagnosis and treatment. This is the first area that you would have to continue to evolve. Wipro GE Healthcare Medical Device Manufacturing facility that was launched in 2022—an initiative to leverage the PLI scheme of Government of India, is trying to solve some of these problems.

Wipro GE Healthcare Medical Device Manufacturing is a multi-SBU facility for manufacturing imaging, DCAR, monitoring solutions, interventional and ultrasound products which comprises of CT machines, cathlab equipment, ultrasound scanners, patient monitoring solutions and ECG machines. The CT machine was completely assembled using state-of-the-art manufacturing practices across four stages followed by a testing stage to ensure functionality and image quality, all at the MDM facility. Lean Action workout involving size simulation of manufacturing line for the CT was conducted to simulate the process flow. The learnings from that were in turn used as inputs for the new MDM facility.

Today we design, develop and manufacture close to 30+ products out of that initiative, which was otherwise not possible. That’s a great example of how we are moving the needle on affordability.