标题
E HealthPoint Transforming Rural Healthcare
What change do you want to bring to the world?
E Health Points units, started in rural India, provide families in villages with clean drinking water, medicines, comprehensive diagnostic tools, and advanced tele-medical services that “bring” a doctor and modern, evidence-based healthcare to their community. Because people come to pick up their water daily, the E Health Point has multiple opportunities to raise awareness about health issues and encourage early treatment of medical conditions. Tying healthcare delivery to water services also provides social cover for patients with socially-taboo conditions, such as tuberculosis or HIV. E Health Points positively changes the perspective of the public versus private health sector by implementing a technology-based social enterprise for low income groups.
What are the primary activities of your project?
Approximately 200 words left (1600 characters).The e HealthPoint (eHP) model bring five critical health services to underserved rural communities: a) Safe drinking water, produced onsite by Reverse Osmosis (RO) and provided to families daily via a prepaid monthly subscription for $ 1.50 per Household ; b) Consultation with qualified doctors located in an urban telemedical center via 2-way video supported by electronic medical records, at $ 0.40 per consultation; c) Full onsite diagnostic laboratory capable of 70 different diagnostic investigations, at an average cost of $ 1; d) Licensed pharmacy stocked with 250 medicines & Over the Counter (OTC) products, mostly low-cost generic medicines offered on price discounts to rural communities e) Responsible referrals to secondary healthcare facilities in public and private sectors
HealthPoint builds and operates clusters of these eHP units, each containing 1 clinic and 1 WaterPoint in a central village and with 2-3 additional WaterPoints in smaller surrounding villages (because while people will walk 1-2 kilometers for healthcare, they will not carry 20 liters of water that far). Our first set of clusters are already operating sustainably (cashflow positive), showing that the project is scalable on a commercial basis. Moreover, the project is having a significant social impact, uniquely combining a major preventive health intervention (safe drinking water, to largely eliminate waterborne diseases) with modern medical care, while creating 12-13 jobs per cluster (many for women) that are largely staffed from the communities served. As of September 20, 2011, we have 8 operating clinics and 75 operating WaterPoints, and are now starting to build additional units rapidly to enlarge the impact and bring the project (and the company) to sustainability. The mission of the company is to enhance health and productivity in underserved rural communities and our goal is to transform rural healthcare by demonstrating the commercial viability , long-term sustainability and social impact of the eHP model at scale.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
E HealthPoint has combined various existing and emerging technologies (like Broadband and Telemedicine , Electronic Health Records, Point of Care&Mobile Diagnostics, Reverse Osmosis based water purification) to deliver this unique business model primarily for underserved rural communities. While a variety of organisations in Public/Private/NGO sectors are providing various components of Healthcare and Water services, we believe that The E HealthPoint model is a pioneering and unique model that has bundled all these 5 services for the low income communities , especially in rural. The combination of the various standalone components as a service delivery model, using broadband for a doctor-patient interaction , combining preventive and curative services , bringing urban facilities to rural rather asking rural to come to urban has been a new contribution to the field . Thus E HealthPoint has developed and implemented an innovative, effective, culturally acceptable, replicable , participative , scalable and sustainable model to reduce health inequities and enhance human productivity .
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
Approximately 200 words left (1600 characters).About the Community that HealthPoint currently serves:
●200,000 rural communities in India have no source of safe drinking water; an even larger number have no effective access to qualified doctors, modern diagnostic tests, or a licensed pharmacy without travelling to a city. Most rural communities instead rely on informal (untrained/mostly non-qualified) health providers (there are 2.5 million informal health providers in rural India as opposed to 60,000 doctors), informal pharmacies that often sell fake , low potency or outdated medicines, and a total absence of modern diagnostic laboratories. The E HealthPoint model is designed explicitly to address these unmet needs, based on market research that showed rural households in India spend an average of $ 42 per year out of pocket on (poor quality) healthcare and prior experience that shows they are willing to spend Euro $ 15-20 per year for safe drinking water. The E HealthPoint model is a for pay (fee for service) model and relies on use of modern technologies (including rural broadband, telemedical software, low-cost point-of-care diagnostics, and inexpensive water treatment methods) and de-skilling of many aspects of primary care (through standardized procedures and thorough training of local staff) to bring costs within the ability/willingness to pay of most rural households. HealthPoint provides these services (described above) directly to individuals and households in the communities it serves, typically achieving at least 50 percent penetration of households within a few months and resulting a very high degree of economic , financial benefits to the community .The rural communities served by the Company have the following consumer segments:
•Upscale (landowners): at least 5% of village population, typically have automobile transport, can afford bottled water from urban areas. To this customer, E HealthPoint water and health services represents convenience; premium services (water delivery, no waiting for doctors, phone consultation with doctors from home, etc.) may be required. They seek High Quality by paying a premium if required, practice an urban-equivalent lifestyle, demand personalized attention and service, consciously make efforts towards achieving health & wellness;
•Dominant Middle (farmers, local merchants, family members working in nearby town/city areas, retired military): up to 65% of village population, upward striving. To this customer, E HealthPoint water is aspirational, an urban-quality service, with better taste, healthier. E HealthPoint health services are especially appealing to women (50% of customers), and our planned pre-paid health service “packages” for maternal/child care may offer a similar aspirational appeal. This consumer segment seeks value for money and the convenience of daily availability of water. They typically have a household income of between $6-$8/day.
•Landless Poor (day laborers, males of household often away): up to 30% of village population. To this customer, E HealthPoint water and healthcare appears out of reach or is simply not useful to the dominant decision-maker because he is not home. PPP vouchers or other subsidies may be required to capture these consumers, most of whom have incomes below the official Indian poverty line. They comprise sub-groups having varying degrees of perception, willingness and affordability to spend on accessing paid services in water and health. However, the lure of free health services from government facilities (even if intermittently available) and the availability of untreated water for free (even if contaminated) combined with inertia prevents this segment at present from using our services to any significant degree.
Waterpoint Customers. These customer are largely from the dominant middle customer segment, make up to 30 visits a month to a waterpoint to collect their water or (where available) get water delivered at the doorstep; typically waterpoint customers comprise 42% to 50% or more of community households; they spend $1.50/month via prepaid subscription on our water services;
•Drivers are taste, perceived quality, to a lesser degree health, also the aspirational appeal of a modern water supply; the “buyer” is the dominant household male, often strongly influenced by his wife/peers; buying decisions made in the home, not at the eHP, so “water promoters” and other social marketing outreach to household is critical; Water collector may be a boy child, an elder male, young man, or a woman
E HealthPoint Healthcare Customers.
•Walk-in traffic is about 50% women; walk-in customers typically spend $2.25 per visit (including diagnostics and pharmacy), are largely from the dominant middle; telemedical consultations seen as offering enhanced privacy (compared the informal providers that often gossip about their customers); Consultations are the dominant driver of diagnostic and pharmacy traffic, although walk-in or referral traffic for diagnostics and pharmacy is rising;
•Repeat walk-in traffic is sporadic and seasonal, reflecting illness patterns, and faces strong competition from entrenched informal providers;
• A key challenge, however, especially for chronic disease management or nutritional supplements, is that there is low culture of preventive healthcare in rural India; thus extended marketing efforts to change behaviors and possibly initial subsidies may be required to successfully introduce these services.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
The Co-founders Amit Jain and Al Hammond met each other at the Santa Clara Social Benefit Incubator in year 2008. At that conference, Amit and Al began sharing ideas and immediately noticed synergies between their ideas about delivering healthcare and associated health services to rural communities in India which are at the base-of-the-pyramid through a well designed social enterprise. This was a combination of ideas on telemedicine-pharmaceuticals-diagnostics which needed demand-generation and the delivery of clean water, an obvious component of healthcare, that would bring customers to the clinics and generate both demand and revenue. Amit and Al’s resources, skills, and capabilities were also complementary, as together they brought perspective on models for business at the base-of-the-pyramid and knowledge about willingness-to-pay and the much needed social marketing expertise, operational know-how, and experience with implementation. Both the co-founders recall, “We were sitting across the table from each other and we both thought, why don’t we do this together?” Essentially on the spot, Amit and Al forged the partnership that became Healthpoint Services. Since beginning of the pioneering E HealthPoint model in the later part of 2009 , there have been several innovations added which have been resultant of constant stakeholder engagement and a culture of innovation and need-based product and service delivery instituted by the co-founders.
