Healthcare With Last-Mile Access

Sujay Santra was working as a solution architect at Oracle, a cloud application and platform services company, and was fully immersed in the technology space. While working, he received news from home that his father was experiencing cardiac health issues and needed specialist care. 

His father began seeking care, travelling back and forth between local providers to identify the medications and support that he needed to recover. Unfortunately, after six months of consultation and instruction, his father and family were informed that the wrong medication had been prescribed due to a lack of care coordination and expertise.

For him, this personal experience had him wondering how someone with significant education, access to technology, and financial resources could be put into this situation – and how those without the same knowledge and privileges would navigate the healthcare system. Seeing a lack of technological applications in health that could coordinate care between multiple providers and across patients, he established iKure Techsoft in 2010 to keep the provider-patient conversation continuing beyond clinical walls.

Their objective is to scale from 10 clinics of their own to 200 clinics in the next four years and to deploy 10,000 frontline workers of their own. Apart from that Santra also intends to strengthen their device integration and technology system.

He feels that there are a lot of people who cannot afford primary healthcare due to poverty and expensive healthcare services. When they provide those services at an affordable cost and they are able to avail it, seeing that smile and joy on their faces makes all the difference.

Knowing that they are being able to reach millions of underserved patients and their innovation is being able to disrupt the primary healthcare system of India is what drives him even more.

Their employees are their most valuable resources and he provides them with the platform to foster their professional and personal growth in alignment with the growth of the organisation. They encourage them to bring their ideas and innovation to the table no matter how unachievable it sounds and hence, provide a seamless platform which has no barriers for sharing of new ideas and concepts.

As an organisation they are always looking for people who are keen on learning and bringing in ideas no matter what their position is. The open culture that they have enables them to understand, learn and share their knowledge, experiences and innovation freely.

They believe that through their venture they have been able to unlock their best potential in the following ways: 

•Sustainable model: Over the past several years, iKure has developed a "business model" that is sustainable and scalable.

•Unique combination of services: iKure is a unique combination of primary healthcare delivery, own technology platform and research. It has an on-ground presence with a network of hub & spoke clinics and trained frontline health workers.

•Thought leader: iKure is recognised as a "thought leader" for primary healthcare delivery with last-mile access.

As an organisation, they are always hungry for innovation. The ability to strengthen their primary healthcare system in partnership with various Indian and international stakeholders enables them to bring out their best potential and ensure problem-solving.