Neurosynaptic Communications: A rural healthcare initiative

About 70 percent of India's population living in rural areas has poor or no access to even basic healthcare facilities with 80 percent of India's doctors practicing in our cities. The healthcare burden is the largest non-productive debt in rural India and millions of families get pushed below the poverty line every year due to these crippling expenditures.

While rural healthcare is an estimated USD 30 billion market it is difficult to access due to a lack of established delivery channels. Hoping to bring an end to this suffering, Sameer Sawarkar and Rajeev Kumar founded Neurosynaptic Communications in 2002. Their venture enables access to affordability and quality in primary healthcare for rural and remote areas through technology.
While a lot of us sit and talk about the deplorable condition of healthcare in rural India Sameer Sawarkar and Rajeev Kumar set out to bring a change. Using 17 years of combined technical experience the duo teamed up with the TeNeT Group from IIT Chennai to develop ReMeDi. A remote diagnostic kit, ReMeDi ensures consultations via mobile and video conferencing at internet bandwidths as low as 32 kbps.
Designed to measure a patient's temperature, BP, pulse rate and conduct an ECG, ReMeDi can measure and transmit vitals, manage e-billings and store medical records. Working with minimal infrastructure and skills the tool can be installed in computers in village clinics run by local high school graduates and operate on less than 2 watts of battery power. The duo offer ReMeDi to healthcare ventures looking to start operations in rural India.
Sameer Sawarkar, Co-founder and CEO, Neurosynaptic Communications said, "The needs of the rural patients or the rural healthcare needs are really addressed by a range of non-qualified to semi-qualified healthcare providers and there is a huge gap in access to healthcare in the rural areas as compared to what the urban areas have. When we came across this problem about 10 years ago we strongly felt that this is a problem which technology can very easily address and solve."
Neurosynaptic Communications today reaches approximately 20 million villagers in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Karnataka through a network of 450 rural telemedicine centers. In 2011 there were more than a 100,000 paid rural consultations. 75 percent of these patients did not have to travel beyond their villages for healthcare access.
In 2008 they ventured into a partnership with the non-profit organization World Health Partners (WHP). WHP has been using ReMeDi to provide telemedicine consultations with 80 telemedicine centers in three districts of UP and over 200 centers in 13 districts of Bihar.
With a revenue model that works on the sell of the ReMeDi device, Rajeev Kumar, Co-founder and COO, Neurosynaptic Communications tells CNBC-TV18 how various Neurosynaptic partnerships were. He explained, "WHP is a NGO. We have also setup a network with the government. We have one district-wide deployment in Karnataka and have also worked with private partners. In Madurai we have a hospital outreach program. Hospitals set up these clinics across the district and refer patients to their main hospital, of course providing consultation from the central location. We are also working with the Indian Army. They are using our facilities for their remote locations to connect with military hospitals or army hospitals in a central location."
Recognizing the venture's contributions to rural healthcare, the World Economic Forum named Neurosynaptic a Technology Pioneer in 2008. The company has also won the Global Indus Technovator Award at MIT and the Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI) has featured ReMeDi as one of the five innovative and upcoming healthcare models to watch out for.
Not just accolades Neurosynaptic has also seen its share of investor interest with both Ventureast TeNeT Fund and Ventureast Biotechnology Venture Fund infusing capital. The Technology Development Board has also supported the commercialization of ReMeDi by providing long-term loan assistance and while the venture is profitable the challenges of working at remote locations remain.
Rajeev said, "Infrastructure was a problem initially. It has improved over the years. For example, BSNL connectivity is available in many villages where it was absent earlier. But it's still a challenge in villages. In many places we are using data cards which provide good connectivity, but sometimes it is not a consistent connectivity."
Electricity has been a problem, so we have worked out alternative solutions. We have looked at generators, solar power in some places, but these are expensive compared to what the centre earns.
With rural infrastructure slowly but steadily coming along, Neurosynaptic Communications hopes to reach 75 million people through 1,500 rural telemedicine centres and several thousand mobile village health workers.
The duo aspires to make medical care affordable for 25 percent of the Indian population by 2017 and build an international presence by servicing several African and South Asian countries. As technology continues to advance, Rajeev and Sameer want to experiment with tablet based diagnostic devices and healthcare services.