Social venture looks to boost health care in the world’s slums

Startup brings cost-effective health care to world's slums

Hult Prize winners on how their social venture NanoHealth is helping those in need

NanoHealth, a social venture founded by a group of Indian School of Business alumni to provide health care services for slum dwellers, won this year's HULT Prize Tuesday night.

The prize comes as the result of a partnership between Hult International Business School and the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) that awards $1 million in seed capital to the group that wins the global competition.

This year’s challenge, set by President Bill Clinton, asked universities worldwide to find ways to improve chronic disease care in slums by 2019.

NanoHealth developed an idea to create a network of health workers and equip them with "Dox-in-Box," a diagnostic tool which can take vitals and risk-profile patients for diabetes and hypertension.

“What you need to diagnosis a problem or disease, we have tried to bring that into a device which we call the ‘Dox-in-Box,’” said Manish Ranjan, NanoHealth CEO. “This device is portable, put it in a backpack and its the idea to bring health care or the doctor to their doorstep.”

After a doctor within the NanoHealth network confirms a disease in a patient, the “Dox-in-Box” can provide monitoring services. By adding doctors and pharmacies to its network, NanoHealth hopes that its program can become a “one-step shop” when dealing with chronic disease management.

“This has been tried in hundreds of thousands of patients across the world where the idea is if you do a persistent messaging environment around the patient, prescription compliance improves from 15 percent to 85 percent,” said Ashish Bondia, NanoHealth chief medical officer.

“We are talking about saving lives, more than a million premature deaths can be prevented if we are able to implement this solution across the globe,” he added.

“The startups we had this year --- bubblegum that took on oral disease and tooth decay, honey bees that could detect cancer, etc. … so we had some really radical startups and the perspective of the Hult Prize, we are not identifying them, we are literally building them from scratch,” said Ahmad Ashkar, CEO and founder of the Hult Prize.