The health-tech edge (Financial Express)

Mains Paper 2:Health 
Prelims level: Health start-up
Mains level: Describe the role of tech start-up to build public healthcare infrastructure 

Context:

• Covid-19 has exposed the gaps in public healthcare infrastructure and human resources, if this hadn’t already been obvious. 
• Even metros like Delhi and Mumbai, the disaster that awaits the country if the pandemic spreads widely in the rural areas isn’t hard to imagine.

Reason behind to build health start-up:

• Uttar Pradesh, for instance, has just 4 doctors for 10,000 population, against the national average of 7 per 10,000 population. 
• Against such a backdrop, it is fortunate that India has a thriving nursery of health-tech start-ups, most of which seem tailored to bridging the gaps between demand and supply of healthcare infrastructure and personnel. 
• Not only have health start-ups been able to bolster India’s stock of PPEs, N95 masks, ventilators, even 3D-printed face-shields, etc, many health-tech ones are helping crucial hospital functions to reduce human-to-human contact.
• The Centre, states and even municipalities—to beef up healthcare capacity on its own, it needs to partner with start-ups and help scale up innovations, whether from the private or the public sector. 
• Karnataka and Rajasthan seem to be .............................................

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Examples:

• Kerala-based start-up Asimov Robotics has created a self-sanitising robot that can deliver food, sterilised equipment, ingestibles at the bed-side in hospitals, reducing pressure on healthcare-workers.
• Janitri, founded in 2017, has monitored 27,000 pregnancies across 100 healthcare facilities in the two states with two offerings, Daksh and Keyar—the former is a tablet-based intelligent labour-monitoring tool while the latter is a wearable fetal heart-rate and uterine contraction monitoring device. 
• Both products improve efficiency and ease of monitoring, given they erase the need for bulky, non-transportable machines, human error in data monitoring and entry, etc. 
• Niramai, a Bengaluru-based health analytics company, has developed a non-invasive technique to detect breast cancer which uses heat signatures to determine if cancer exists—now, the same technology has been repurposed for real-time body-temperature-monitoring for large groups.
• 5C Network, another Bengaluru-based start-up, makes consultation from a panel of expert radiologists available remotely, by facilitating direct uploads of radiological scans from hospitals and diagnostic centres on to its portal. 
• Teleradiology, in a country that has just 1 radiologist per 100,000 population, could prove transformational, especially in rural areas.

Way forward:

• While the Centre has conducted/sponsored hackathons for targeted solutions for Covid-related issues, the engagement with health-tech start-ups has to go beyond such sporadic support. 
• State/local governments need to map the delivery-gaps in public healthcare, whether because of a lack of infrastructure or personnel, and engage start-ups that are offering solutions to these problems. 
• Only with such backing from the government can there be meaningful scaling up ..............................

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1)With reference to the import of exotic species, consider the following statements:
1. Species covered by the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 cannot be traded.
2. People importing “exotic live species” will have to make a mandatory disclosure.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer....................

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Mains Questions:
Q.1)How governments are can engage with tech start-ups to close public healthcare gaps?