Agile Healthcare & Rehabilitation Services Pvt Ltd (AHRS), promoted by a group of UK-Based doctors of Indian origin has entered into a strategic collaboration with Kolkata-head quartered Glocal Healthcare Services to offer Telemedicine based Primary Healthcare across Tier IV towns in India and also market and implement Glocal’s Digital Dispensaries in U.K.
The plan is to set up 500 such healthcare centers across Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh- places that are really in need of access to doctors and rational Healthcare.
Five centers have already been set up and 65 centers have been identified. In the first 6 months, 150 centers would be set up and subsequently scaled up.
Both Glocal and Agile plan to make a difference to primary healthcare in India in areas where general practice among physicians is almost non-existent. This has given rise to a greater focus on specialized care that tends to make healthcare unaffordable to the large majority of the population.
Dr Vishal Upadhyay, MRCS,FRCS (Tr & Orth) UK, one of the brains behind Agile said that they have identified Glocal to deliver primary healthcare in areas where people are mostly dependent on either government services that are largely ill-equipped and private practice which is expensive. He added that the reason to add Glocal as a partner was because of its technological strength which has the capability of a huge outreach coupled with fast and effective delivery of healthcare.
Dr Upadhyay said that Agile will also be marketing and implementing the Digital Dispensaries in UK where there are a lot of patients who need to be brought in to the hospital by ambulance for Outpatient consultations consuming expensive time and resources of the ambulance service.
He added that implementing what they believe in is the core solution to the problem of healthcare in India. “The Agile plan is build to address this serious issue of primary healthcare in India, which we believe will go a long way in establishing a healthy society in the country,” Dr Upadhay said.
Glocal Healthcare’s CEO of Digital Dispensaries, Gautam Chowdhury said that they were delighted to enter into a strategic collaboration with Agile Healthcare. “We are happy to sign the MoU with Agile. Health is a basic need and only technology can solve the problems of healthcare in India. We can bring good accredited doctors, even specialists to the hard-to-reach areas, set up fully functional dispensaries.”
He added, “Through Digital Dispensaries, we can address several key issues in the country’s primary care, including the shortage of facilities and doctors, better diagnosis and access to medicine, integrating most of the digital healthcare solutions within a single product at the lowest cost.”
So far Glocal has been operating more than 124 such dispensaries spreading from East to West in Rajasthan, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Manipur. In addition to a government-sponsored model, Glocal has now decided to launch the entrepreneurship model to expand the reach of healthcare to the unserved and the underserved.
