Bangalore: Tata Elxsi and Narayana Hrudayalaya today announced the signing of an MoU to mark their strategic alliance to develop affordable, high-quality healthcare solutions. The partnership brings together Tata Elxsi’s technology and design expertise and Narayana Hrudayalaya’s domain knowledge to develop medical devices for the mass market that will drastically reduce the cost of procedures and thus make healthcare solutions more accessible and affordable for the general public. This is critical in a country like India where the majority of the population does not have access to even basic treatment facilities.

 

While Tata Elxsi, through its industrial design division, IDE, will undertake the entire design and development work of the devices, Narayana Hrudayalaya will provide support for problem identification, domain knowledge and clinical trials. The partnership will develop devices through innovation, value engineering and new technologies, to create simple, effective and economical healthcare tools and techniques which can be used by doctors in the key areas of healthcare. Tata Elxsi’s experience in working on devices for India and emerging markets will further ensure that these objectives are judiciously met.

 

Speaking on the occasion, Madhukar Dev, MD, Tata Elxsi, said, “We are very happy to collaborate with Narayana Hrudayalaya in the area of healthcare devices. While Narayana Hrudayalaya has been pioneering affordable and innovative health services in the country, Tata Elxsi’s strength lies in developing innovative devices by internalising the environmental sensibilities of the healthcare industry and creating intuitive solutions that are both cost-effective and robust. This partnership will indeed aim at making a substantial difference for both the doctors using the devices and patients who are paying for the treatment.”

 

The medical devices that are used today in various treatments have a prolonged development cycle as they need to be clinically tested and certified before they can be used on patients. Moreover, for devices to become viable they have to address key parameters of cost, functionality and availability. It becomes critical to understand these challenges and channelise all efforts to optimise the development cycle which, if achieved, can make a huge difference in the health care system in India and other developing countries. It is therefore important for extensive research and development to be undertaken by corporates to speed up the pace of development.

 

“At Narayana Hrudayalaya, we believe the need of the hour is to create a viable platform for health care providers like us to share, learn, understand and extend the services to the needy. We have over the years tried to balance the availability of world-class treatment facilities with our efforts to help people who today can’t dream of leading a normal life because of the high cost of treatment. We are therefore always looking at new avenues to make this available and we feel this partnership with Tata Elxsi which has the experience and knowhow having worked on such projects before, will be a step in that direction. We can therefore leverage each other’s expertise and knowledge to work towards a common goal of quicker and better healthcare solutions for people, not just in India but around the world,” Dr Devi Shetty, MD and chairman, Narayana Hrudayalaya said. 
 

To sum up the partnership, Rajesh Shelke, senior design manager, healthcare domain, IDE, Tata Elxsi, said “The field of healthcare devices has not been explored to its potential and the impact it has made has been restricted. The challenge is therefore how to make these devices accessible and cost-effective for developing countries like India with their limited healthcare systems where these devices can indeed be a life-saver.”