Product innovation. The words sound good but it would be much better if they translated into action and all of us reaped some of the benefits. It’s not that effort is not being made; it’s just that they don’t seem to be able to get beyond the pilot stage.
For instance, a few years ago, a professor from Thailand talked of collaborating with a local engineering college to run a pilot offering affordable sanitation for the urban poor. The plan was to have six-eight toilets per slum, with three-four households using one unit, creating a system robust enough to handle these quantities. While the ideal would be individual toilets, one per dwelling unit, but pressures on land and water and issues around costs have made the community toilet a preferred choice.
That was a few years ago. The project seems to have sunk without a trace; I tried to follow up but got no response from either the local partners or the Thai professor. This is where poor product innovation is a problem. Perhaps the professor should learn more about innovation workshops in the hope that it is not too late for his affordable sanitation project.
Then, there’s innovation in work flow processes. The Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) came up with MoSQuIT or Mobile based Surveillance Quest using Information Technology. Control of malaria is a thrust area under the UN’s Millenial Development Goals.
This software helps keep a watch over the status of malaria in a group or a community. The solution also helps identify a potential outbreak of the disease and provides an early warning to the state health system for its control. It also helps the state health agencies track the performance of the staff who, in turn, find this easier to work with than the paper based system.
Believing in the need for process and delivery systems innovation, a private Pune- based provider of preventive health check- ups has worked on the backend to deliver services which are accessible and affordable. This service provider is focused on lifestyle diseases since these are spreading rapidly and preventive care could perhaps be the way to check their spread.
Innovation in the delivery mechanism has led to removing inefficiencies which translates into big gains. This provider partners with hospitals, high end diagnostics centres, etc and brings them the patients, the volumes, which brings down costs of the their high end equipment, provides preventive checks for patients and ensures medical equipment manufacturers also win. This partnership model allows hospitals even in Tier three cities to instal expensive scanning machines.
Deploying technology in rural areas has its own challenges but the dairy sector has adopted several innovations. For instance, a large herd in Sangli district of southern Maharashtra, has RFID tagged its animals, allowing them to track feed and health issues, all of which translates into higher revenues for the dairy owners and better products for the consumer.
Poultry is another area where delivery of healthcare at the farmers’ doorstep has led to better practices. A fallout of this has been that when there have been bird flu outbreaks, these have been contained and the outbreaks have happened wherever it has been a backyard operation and not an organised venture.
This highlights a core issue not just in animal healthcare: sectors which are organised have better management systems hence better output, as opposed to a backyard operation where the individual farmer (or small entrepreneur) is left to fend for himself.
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