ACT For Health Grantee: BHS

Basic Healthcare Services (BHS) is an NGO that was born of the realization that rural India still struggles with a lack of access to proper healthcare.

With the aim of ensuring dignified healthcare for vulnerable communities, a group of public health & development professionals came together to set up a network of high quality, low cost primary healthcare services in Rajasthan’s tribal areas.

Tribal communities have a high prevalence of tuberculosis but existing XRay diagnostics are expensive & unavailable in rural PHCs. Patients have to incur huge expenses to travel to the nearest city for the XRay and often drop out of treatment; which can be fatal.

As an ACT For Health grantee, BHS is setting up light and inexpensive XRay machines across 3 AMRIT Clinics in Udaipur and 1 PHC in Dungarpur district to enable timely and effective diagnosis of TB. They’ll install a reader in one of the nodes to capture data from all machines; leading to an estimated cost reduction of 40%.

We are proud to play a small part in BHS’s journey & look forward to the wave of change they’ll bring to underserved communities healthcare needs!

If you’re a healthcare entrepreneur working on an innovative solution to address the access to affordability gap for Bharat, get in touch with us here.

Because we believe that everyone can be a co-founder of social change!

ACT For Health welcomes Periwinkle to its portfolio

Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women in India; accounting for 18.3% of new cases in the country. It is touted as the ‘disease of inequity’ because of the lack of access to modern advancements that have not equally benefited people living in LMICs like India.

Many studies prove that early screening and treatment reduces the overall incidence and prevalence of the disease. But for women living in rural India, low awareness about early detection and scarcity of healthcare resources often leads to the cancer only being diagnosed at an advanced stage; which leads to death.

Pap smears have been used for cervical cancer screening since the 1940s but the methodology is plagued with multiple issues. Pap smears require a complex infrastructure – experts to collect the sample / develop the slide, careful transportation of the slide to the laboratory and expert analysis by a pathologist for the final results. This not only makes this technique cost intensive but also increases the turnaround time for getting the results – which prevents the patient from getting immediate treatment, in case the results are positive.

And while WHO recommends naked VIA tests for LMICs, they also have a major limitation w.r.t. the subjectivity of test results as the accuracy is dependent on the experience of the professional conducting the test.

Taking cognizance of all these issues, ACT For Health has decided to support Periwinkle Technologies which has developed Smart Scope® CX – a handheld device that enables health workers to detect cervical cancer at an early stage, thus, reducing the morbidity and high mortality caused by late diagnosis.

Smart Scope captures images of the cervix with uniform illumination without the need for electricity, space, or other infrastructure. Its AI component analyses the images to provide a risk stratification thus reducing the need for extensive training and experience for the existing personnel to conduct the screening tests. The sensitivity of the test is around 88-90%, which is quite high compared to a pap smear, and the test results can be obtained within 10-15 mins.

ACT Grants is supporting Periwinkle in conducting an operational study in Chhattisgarh, by screening 2500+ women, to establish the benefits of Smart Scope® CX against the current prevalent naked eye VIA test.

Niramai comes on board as an ACT For Health grantee

Cancer, often dubbed as the ’emperor of all maladies’, is one of the leading causes of death globally. Among all prevalent types of cancer, breast cancer continues to account for the largest share of cancer cases globally.

The prevalence of breast cancer in India has sharply increased, primarily as a result of demographic changes and lifestyle modifications. A study found that the overall survival rate for breast cancer is 95% for stage I patients, 92% for stage II patients, 70% for stage III patients, and just 21% for stage IV patients.

According to the WHO, early detection is the key to improving patient survival. In fact in countries like the US and UK, the early stage screening program has led to 30-40% reduction in the mortality rate of breast cancer patients.

However, 60% of breast cancer patients in India are diagnosed only at an advanced stage (stages III and IV), which impacts both healthcare outcomes and the financial burden on patients.

Currently, mammography is the gold standard for screening breast cancer patients. However, it is ineffective for women with dense breasts – which is a dominant trait in the Indian subcontinent. This often results in false positives and over-diagnosis. Moreover, there is a lack of adequate mammography machines and trained manpower which limits widespread cancer screening across the country.

Innovative tools like the one developed by Niramai, a Bengaluru based deeptech startup, shows promise in addressing these limitations. Thermalytix, its proprietary product, is a low cost, portable & radiation-free AI based engine that objectively analyses images to detect thermal signatures for abnormalities. Many clinical studies have demonstrated their superior performance and as a result, Thermalytix has been approved by both the CE and FDA as an adjunct tool for breast cancer screening.

In one of their multicentric clinical investigations for instance, the sensitivity and specificity of their solutions were comparable to mammography while the accuracy being greater for participants with dense breast tissue – making them ideal for women from the Indian subcontinent.

This non-invasive technology has the potential to be socially and culturally more acceptable in countries like India and would therefore, accelerate mass screening of breast cancer in India.

ACT For Health is assisting Niramai in conducting a breast cancer screening in Andhra Pradesh with the goal of enhancing early stage cancer detection and treatment. This program will help 5,000 women in the state and create useful data to aid the replication of such programs across the country.

Vidyakul joins the ACT For Education collective

Since the pandemic, the online tutoring space has picked up immensely; with online classes rapidly replacing the traditional tuition centre model.

While this opened up access to quality teachers for students across the country, these e-learning solutions primarily catered to students in tier 1 cities – those whose families could afford to pay upwards of Rs 20,000 for such services per year. Furthermore, being designed for the English medium CBSE curriculum, they were unable to serve the needs of students from state board schools.

Having studied in a Hindi medium school near Ambala in Punjab, Tarun Saini set out to create an affordable solution that is custom created for state board students.

Vidyakul, his entrepreneurial idea, is a mobile app that offers both live & recorded classes, along with lecture notes and quizzes, for students in grades 9 to 12. Currently operating in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh & Gujarat, Vidyakul employs local teachers to create vernacular educational content for all subjects (including math, science, english & commerce) with contextual examples to help students learn better.

With all courses available only for Rs. 3000 for a full year, not only is this edtech solution highly affordable but also highly effective. Earlier, many of Vidyakul’s current users in remote/rural areas had to travel 20km+ to their nearest physical tuition centre whereas now, they can simply log in to the app on their parents phone for 1-2 hours a day and be taught by trained teachers.

ACT for Education believes in enabling high-quality edtech solutions for Bharat and we look forward to supporting Vidyakul in making theirs more holistic by adding doubt solving mechanisms, personalising the content for students and generating clear evidence of learning outcomes through both in app data and researcher led studies.

ACT For Health concludes its pilot needs assessment study

In order to understand the healthcare innovation landscape from the perspective of medical professionals, ACT conducted a detailed needs assessment study with 45 doctors and physicians from 23 hospitals across 12 states – 50% of whom were privately managed, 30% were charitable and 20% were government run.

The set of hospitals we partnered with for this study were largely at the tertiary point of care and the doctors were uniformly distributed across ACT For Health’s focus areas of diabetes, cancer, tuberculosis, and mental health.

This pilot study helped ACT identify and understand the broad categories of challenges faced by healthcare providers, from screening and diagnosis to treatment and recovery, and assess where technology-based innovation can potentially play a role in improving health care delivery systems.

We found that:

1. Doctors use multiple channels to keep a tab on the latest developments in technology, and WhatsApp group being one of the most common & easily accessible channel

2. Nearly 75% of doctors we interviewed from urban areas are currently using or have used a tech based product compared to only 25% in rural & semi-urban areas. This might be due to the lack of awareness & availability in rural and semi-urban areas.

3. Across the disease areas, one of the most common and critical needs is to strengthen the primary care centers with screening and diagnostic facilities along with capacity building of the general physicians.

4. Lack of awareness about these long-term diseases, especially among patients from rural areas is one of the major challenges.

5. There is a need to strengthen counseling services to help patients and family members understand the diagnosis of such diseases, help them cope with the stress, and improve treatment compliance.

6. Another critical challenge is the misdiagnosis / late diagnosis of a disease at primary care level. For example with cancer, early diagnosis is critical but there are many cases where patients come for diagnosis only at stage 3. Most of these cases could have been diagnosed at an earlier stage at the primary care level if not for the lack of adherence to protocols, diagnostic facilities & well-trained medical personnel.

In the next phase, we plan to conduct a mixed-methodology based research study through surveys and in-depth interviews of general physicians and doctors in primary and secondary care across the country to deep-dive further into some of these nuances.

To know more about the results of our pilot needs assessment study, click here.

ACT For Education portfolio comes together to reimagine edtech for Bharat

We believe that when mission driven individuals come together as a community, magic can happen!️

August saw our entire ACT For Education portfolio come together in Delhi to learn from each other and collaborate with each other. The 2 days were an immersive mix of expert sessions & discussions which galvanised our EdTech For Bharat entrepreneurs around positively shifting the landscape in the time to come.

With over 30 attendees, the event consisted of 8 sessions that were led by different entrepreneurs and explored a variety of topics such as collaborating with the government, role of digital public goods and how to leverage YouTube to scale. We debated key challenges in the current system & brainstormed on enablers that could help us achieve educational social impact at scale – each of us leaving with a thousand ideas on building the future of edtech for good – together.

Our heartfelt gratitude to Manan Khurma (Founder – Cuemath), Sanjay Purohit (Chief Curator – Societal Platform), Gouri Gupta (Director – Central Square Foundation), Rahul Kulkarni (Chief Technologist – Samagra), Erica Arya (India Head – Project Tech4Dev), Mekin Maheshwari (Founder – Udhyam Learning Foundation) & Mohit Bhatnagar (MD – Sequoia Capital) for sharing their wisdom with our incredible group of social entrepreneurs.

At ACT, our community is our superpower. We hope to create more such spaces in the future as we continue to grow our portfolio and catalyse more edtech innovations for Bharat!

Josh Skills joins the ACT For Education portfolio

India’s labour force participation is strikingly low as many youth are unable to secure jobs due to their inability to converse in English – a common requirement for many well-paying jobs.

This language barrier often restricts them from leveraging high-quality skill development courses which are mostly available in English and even for those who can navigate English courses, the user experience is theoretical and doesn’t build confidence in spoken English.

India is very unique given that the majority of the youth know some English but don’t have an environment where they can practice it freely to gain the confidence to speak. Based on this key insight, JoshTalks created the Josh Skills mobile app that offers affordable English courses which are custom created for the youth of Bharat.

Josh Skills certainly isn’t the first app made for spoken English but the high cost of acquisition & the need for live classes are big reasons why many other such courses are expensive and inaccessible to the masses.

With over 17Mn subscribers on their YouTube channel, the Josh team has a strong comparative advantage to attract users and have created a seamless peer to peer learning feature which allows them to practice English with each other; thus reducing the dependency on teachers.

ACT for Education is excited to partner with the JoshSkills team to open up affordable access to the app for youth from low-income backgrounds and develop intelligent content to personalise their learning journey!

ACT For Environment brings Centre For Environmental Concerns (CEC) on board

India accounts for 18% of the world’s population yet just 4% of the world’s water resources. It is the 13th most water stressed country in the world. Agriculture uses 84% of this water. At the same time, our utilization of agricultural water is clearly inefficient – 38% efficiency in comparison to 70-80% in the USA; in other words, 62% of water used for agriculture is being wasted. Groundwater in India contributes 62% of irrigated farming, while groundwater withdrawal increased tenfold between 1980 and 2015.

The challenge is practically nationwide with 256 districts experiencing water stress, and increasingly farmers must rely on expensive tanker water as local groundwater is unavailable. Groundwater is used to grow high-value farm income crops of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and agro-forestry whose demand is rising. Most fruit trees mature to peak yield phase and fetch high income only after 3 to 5 years; in the absence of steady water supply and expensive tanker water, many farmers retain a few high productivity trees and let the others wither. At the same time, farmers face little incentive to conserve water, and often overuse water, to the point of requiring excess fertilizer consumption and sub-optimal yields.

In short, inefficient use of water is devastating to both India’s natural environment as well as agricultural incomes. We need to urgently address our groundwater levels, and radically improving agricultural water utilization is an important starting point for this.

We are excited to fund CEC (Centre for Environmental Concerns) – the creator of SWAR – to dramatically reduce water consumption, promote soil health, reduce fertilizer requirements and improve crop yields and thus farmer incomes.

System of Water for Agricultural Rejuvenation (SWAR) is a sub-soil water diffuser which can connect to existing drip irrigation systems to deliver moisture in a calibrated manner to the root zone, where it is most needed, ensuring optimal absorption and eliminating evaporation losses. It has been proven to yield water savings of 30-70%, reduce soil nutrient requirements by approximately 30%, improve crop quality and yield (5-10%) and increase farmer incomes by Rs. 35,000+ per acre.

The product was developed with scientists and farmers with the dual purpose of ensuring water security and increasing livelihoods for small and marginal farmers.

The SWAR system is much more comprehensive than just water savings and covers the 5 Ms:

  • Moisture
  • Measurement
  • Microbes
  • Mychorisae (Fungi to support plant root health)
  • Management

To us, this holistic and systemic approach to soil health, farmer needs, and agricultural water efficiency is an enormous area of differentiation.

ACT For Environment will be working with the CEC team to ensure the widespread adoption of SWAR, scaling the business side of operations and accelerating sales to reach more farmers across India, while continuing to serve marginal farmers.

ACT For Health Grantee: Intelehealth

For rural India, access to proper healthcare is more a privilege than a right.

This was the insight that led Dr. Neha Verma, a biomedical engineer, to become an entrepreneur who incubated Intelehealth at Johns Hopkins as a Global Health Innovation Fellow.

The greatest challenge in rural areas is a lack of doctors and inadequate capacities of mid-level providers in PHCs & HWCs. Intelehealth, an open-source digital platform, bridges that gap by empowering public health services deliver affordable primary healthcare to rural communities through telemedicine.

As an ACT For Health grantee, Intelehealth has partnered with the Odisha state government to deliver comprehensive primary healthcare across 30 districts by training frontline workers like ASHAs & ANMs, enabling less specialised health workers to take up specialised tasks & strengthening eSanjeevani telemedicine for access to specialised health workers, where required.

This project aims to develop a resilient and accessible primary healthcare while improving health outcomes and we’re excited to see the transformation it will bring to Odisha’s public healthcare system in the time to come!

If you’re a social entrepreneur working on an innovative solution to the access to affordability gap on healthcare in India, get in touch with us here.

Because we believe that everyone can be a co-founder of social change!

ACT For Health Grantee: Coronasafe Network

Sanjay Vijayakumar is a tech entrepreneur who leverages his engineering background to problem solve for the social sector. In 2020, he identified the pandemic as a grave threat before most others and decided to ACT!

In addition to leveraging his network to gather real time data, Sanjay mobilised a vibrant group of individuals to come together as the Coronasafe network and created CARE – a pandemic management tool that streamlined information and action on managing COVID patients in partnership with the National Health Mission.

Since then, the software has supported over 3.5 lakh patients and has allowed multiple state governments to make timely, data driven decisions.

As the pandemic receded, Sanjay and his team at Coronasafe began to understand the severity of the actual problem – rural India still struggles with lack of healthcare infrastructure because of a lack of qualified healthcare professionals. It was a problem that required a tech driven solution – a tele ICU that could enable specialists to virtually connect with doctors in rural areas.

Since developing and maintaining such technology was expensive, Coronasafe inducted the best student developers in the country and with their help, CARE was enhanced to have a TeleICU feature that ensures availability of quality critical care in rural India.

Today, as a part of the 10 Bed ICU project, CARE is being deployed in 1250 ICUs in government hospitals across Karnataka, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Sikkim and Assam.

We’re proud to have them on board and look forward to the impact their work will have on accessibility to quality healthcare!

If you’re a social entrepreneur working on an innovative solution to the access to affordability gap on healthcare in India, get in touch with us here.

Because we believe that everyone can be a co-founder of social change!

ACT Capital Foundation For Social Impact is a not-for-profit company incorporated and registered under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. All donations made to ACT Capital Foundation are eligible for income tax deduction under Section 80G of the Income Tax Act.

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