In 2009, McKinsey’s Clay Chandler interviewed Sameer Sawarkar, founder and CEO of Neurosynpatic Communications, through what read like an enjoyable interview, Sawarkar spoke quite eloquently about ReMeDi—his low-cost telemedicine solution that aims to connect rural patients to urban doctors via the Internet. In essence the diagnostics tool, run by a local kiosk operator, sends key information to doctors often densely located in urban areas, who make a preliminary diagnosis for the patient. In many cases not only will this device connect patients to the doctors, but it will save cash poor and even time poorer rural dwellers both time and money and possibly even their lives.
Based in India, Sawarkar was driven by the desire to pragmatically tackle one the biggest problems in global health care delivery – delivering healthcare to the poor and rural dwellers in emerging markets. He cites ‘poor infrastructure, insufficient supply of skilled doctors, and dispersed poor populations’, chief amongst the barriers to delivering ‘sustainable healthcare’. Change the name to any other from any other emerging market and he could have been talking about at least 50 other countries in the world.
Fast forward to 2011, five hopeful big Pharma employees are standing before senior management presenting ‘healthconnector’ one of five innovation solutions that they hope will be given the go ahead for implementation. The team’s presenter a young MBA who had worked on a pilot project in one African country, skillfully went through the narrative of the presentation. He cited the number of healthcare professionals missing across Africa, gave comparative statistics showing access to doctors across the globe, demonstrated the time burden imposed on people in rural areas who sometimes had to travel for days before they could see a doctor, reminding the audience that some never made it, before moving on to the next slide. Then he unleashed ‘health connector’ on the unsuspecting members of the jury, ‘This is how we can start to make an impact on the healthcare needs of rural Africans, we bring the doctors to them’. Then he went quickly through the business model, financials and ended with presentation with a ticking clock and text emerging out of the slide PowerPoint animation fade style. ‘XXX numbers of children have died while I've given this presentation, the time to act is now’. Tugging on those heartstrings - It was his final call to action; the team probably thought that would drive the urgency and importance of the solution home. 30 minutes of Q&A after the 15 minute presentation, ‘healthconnector’ had had its moment of glory; it was time to wait for the verdict.
After a couple of hours of buzzing around the teams gathered to hear the verdict of the jury, it was good news for some but not for ‘healthconnector’. The biggest objection was ‘how are the already overburdened doctors going to cope with all the new patients?’ and a valid objection it was, but not one that should have stopped the proposed project in its tracks, particularly as the charitable arm of the big Pharma company quite ironically has a focus on building the capacity of healthcare workers and infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa. Given a little more thought and with some well thought through partnerships, it would not have been impossible to train other healthcare professionals to deal with what would have been basic triage, freeing up the time of the doctors to deal with more critical issues.
Now while it is impossible to tell how this faithful group of five would have fared in front of execs from some of the other big Pharmas, it does get one thinking about where the big innovations of the future in healthcare solutions are going to come from. Historically, big Pharma has focused on ‘products’, healthy product pipelines were, and to a large extent are all that matter. While it is slowly starting to use language like ‘affecting health outcomes’, many pharma execs still lose sleep over the state of their pipelines.
Younger, smaller, nimbler companies like Neurosynpatic Communications, which are even pharmaceutical companies, however don’t have the legacy or burden of this history. Their corporate cultures and structures haven’t evolved to focus purely on product; this probably gives them a higher chance of bringing game changing breakthroughs to the table. Breakthroughs which may not see much of the light of day if they aren’t backed by the big players, since businesses of healthcare business isn’t cheap and needs to be scalable.
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