Telemedicine Helping India’s Poor (9:48 a.m. NY)

Sabahat Azim knew India’s health-care system wasn’t serving the nation’s poor, rural residents. He wanted to create something to bridge the gap between private and public options. He tapped technology.

Azim’s company, Glocal Healthcare Systems, uses telemedicine to connect doctors in urban centers with people in remote areas of India. The company can create a mini-clinic that costs about $25,000 to build and can be set up in less than a day. There, workers can perform tests, check people’s vitals and upload the data to Glocal’s clinical-decision support system, which helps doctors make better diagnoses and allows them to focus more on their patients.

“To solve the problem of the poor, it’s a bad thing to do when you think of putting in a cheap thing,” Azim said in a presentation called “New Economy Game Changer on Health.” “You have to be able to put the most expensive thing that can create so much productivity that the product itself can be cheaper in the hands of the person.”

Glocal operates about 240 clinics and 11 hospitals across India.