At the Xynteo Exchange /India 2022, Brian Wyatt, SVP Global Head of Medical Technology & Healthcare, Cyient and Krishna Bodanapu, Chief Executive Officer, Cyient explains how the company aims to create a new model for growth. As part of the healthcare impact track, the company will be incubating multiple projects that aim at delivering technology enabled healthcare solutions, primarily focussed on the diagnostic space.
Why have you decided to enter in the Indian healthcare market? What is your vision going forward?
Primarily, Cyient is a technical services provider. We provide services to various industries including the highly regulated ones such as aerospace and transportation, but healthcare is one of the recent focuses. Identifying the opportunities in the healthcare industry, we can offer value to the marketplace. Our interface to the market is through large original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Phillips and GE, but we have seen tremendous amount of traction recently with some of the indigenous players in India. These players basically come from segments like in-vitro diagnostics, diagnostics imaging space. The Indian healthcare market is a complex one but simultaneously offers many opportunities. It is one thing to come up with new technology and another to provide it to the people who actually need it. There is a lot of promise in terms of technology but there is still a gap for it to reach to the market and so we are exploring collaborations.
Why are you more inclined towards collaborating with the government than private players, seeing that the new advancements will not be as affordable if it comes to public health?
The intent is not necessarily collaborating with the government and government is only the secondary piece of this initiative. We are aiming to create a platform, primarily in technology agnostic platform that uses technology and delivers affordable healthcare to the majority of the country. Now the partners could be government along with the technology companies and healthcare companies. The idea is not to partner with them, we majorly aim to follow the bottom-up approach wherein we need to have a platform and then the government can be one constituent of it.
Can you elaborate on the initiatives planned?
Essentially, looking at the statistics in terms of the gap between availability of doctors and the population or the spend in healthcare versus what the global spend, there is a huge gap. To overcome the gap, it is probably a 50-100 year timeline to bring in the doctors and create the infrastructure. Having said that, there is also tremendous opportunity available and technology can be used to deliver healthcare a lot more effectively. Now, many things which could earlier be done only in the physical world can now easily be done in a digital world, for instance blood pressure monitoring. So, we aim to find a platform or a delivery mechanism wherein the innovative technology that is manifesting in plenty of new devices can be made available to the market players because even today the last mile is the problem. Getting the technology access to the user is the intent of this platform.
Globally medical diagnostics, for instance, only one per cent of healthcare spent is on diagnostics but 70 per cent of the decisions are made based on the one per cent of spent and we think that is just going to increase over time. It is really about increasing the information that people can use to make decisions faster and so we think there is a tremendous amount of leverage there and that is where our focus is. That is why we chose diagnostics as the segment we want to start with, early diagnostics or preventive diagnostics makes it easier for people to manage their lifestyle better and to not get to the situation where it becomes a crises.
Can you throw some light on which technologies will you be deputing?
It is a combination of all, be it AI or Internet of things, I think all of them is an enabler. Like for example, there is a company called Cardiac Device labs who we work with. They are building a product that analysis ECG over a 24-hour period and is able to determine some very specific arrhythmia conditions that exist in Indian male population. So if you look at how diagnostics is done in that case, one is through AI but it also involves application of technology which helps to capture data and puts in into an algorithm. So the combination of technology brings a very interesting outcome.
In India, the out of pocket expenses are high and not many people have medical insurances, how accessible will these be then?
The business model is not to make it available to the general public but to rent it to the doctor through which patients will be able to get a diagnosis at an affordable price. As for the price point, the way we look at is that leaving the top 10 per cent of the population that can access to private healthcare, we are targeting the next 30 per cent of the population now. In order to work for the remaining chunk of the population, we will have to tap into the government initiatives. We think that if can prove ourselves through the 30 per cent of the population that we are targeting, we can then aim to tap into government funding. We are open to move forward in either direction though, even the top 10 per cent of the population could turn out to be market we want to work for.
What are your plans for expansion?
We are planning it PAN India, but in the beginning, for convenience it might be restricted to where our partners are based and where their point of delivery is. We also believe that if we focus on a small area and prove it out, it will become a lot easier to spread out rather than trying to set up everywhere. We are also in talks with the government.
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