What it takes to build an innovative healthcare solution: K Chandrasekhar, Founder & CEO, Forus Health

Tuesday August 05, 2014 , 2 min Read

With the mantra to ‘Innovate’, ‘Implement’ and ‘Impact’, K. Chandrasekhar, Founder of Forus health, built a product called 3nethra. It is an intelligent pre-screening Ophthalmology device to eliminate preventable blindness.

Though the product was started for the Indian market, today it is being used in nearly 14 countries. Highlighting the innovative methods employed in building the product and the organisations’ mission to address the healthcare delivery crisis in the developing world through innovative and inclusive product design and service deployment, K. Chandrasekhar, talks about what it takes to build an innovative healthcare solution:

These are the key takeaways on product-building from the video:

Solving the problem is really important not just making the device alone. So, unless someone from the affected community is involved, you can identify the person with a problem but you can’t solve it.
You have to make sure that your product is appropriate for the current market. In this case, the stake holders are the patients, the service provider the doctors, the institutes and so on. You need to have a product that will fit into the current market realistically and slowly make small delta changes.
When you focus on a particular problem, build the entire agenda of what you want to attack and then build a product with those specifications. Of course, when you built it, you may want to implement it in phases. You may want to start off with a low hanging fruit, gain confidence on the product as well as on the technology and then start going deeper into areas and then create some significant impact.
What we have in this country is a lot of problems. So we can make a significant difference by creating an apposite service or product and then attack such problems. If you are on the ground and understood the real problem, then you can build a product which will make an impact. Always try to go and see how much of an impact your product will make or has the potential to make.

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