Tag: Public Healthcare

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

After years of working in the pharmaceutical sector – Aditi Ganju, a clinical biochemist, and her husband Dr. Aakash Ganju began thinking about how they could enable healthier futures for India’s underserved communities.

Saathealth, their entrepreneurial venture, was born as an attempt to help low-income families get easy access to credible health information and make timely healthcare decisions.

At the peak of COVID’s 2nd wave, they realised the wide gap between such communities and healthcare providers and decided to create an AI powered app. One that could not only share health information in an engaging and gamified way but also drive better health outcomes through connections with affordable healthcare.

Today, the Saathealth app is tailored to vernacular needs and has already reached over 7 million individuals across 10 cities!

We’re so excited to see the change their efforts will bring in India’s healthcare landscape in the coming time!

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!