Rosy future for healthcare startups

Government is offering several incentives to promote new startups so as to help the youngsters take up innovative ventures with out-of-the box ideas

Visakhapatnam: WITH the pandemic offering several challenging opportunities, former Chairman and Managing Director of National Research Development Corporation H Purushotham on Saturday said youngsters foraying into entrepreneurship by floating startups have a bright future in the health sector.

Stating that the startups finding out solutions to various health issues occupy second position in the total ecosystem, he told Bizz Buzz that the Government of India was also offering several incentives to promote new startups so as to help the youngsters to take up innovative ventures with out-of-the box ideas.

Prof Purushotham, who is the Department for Promotion of Industries and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Intellectual Property Rights Chair at Andhra University, said the government was focusing on pedagogy and research in IPRs for holistic education and academia to spread innovation culture and create awareness on patents.

He underlined the role being played by incubators and accelerators in crossing the valley of death in the innovation value chain and called for more seed funding support to facilitate maturing of the healthcare technologies as the health care technologies have to comply with the stringent regulatory compliance to be successful in the market.

He cited the importance and benefits of Intellectual Property (IP) protection and advised all the startups to protect their IPs before launching their product or come forward to mitigate the litigations to sustain.

He stated that less invasive diagnostics, mobile apps, wearables, remote monitoring solutions, digital platform integration, surgical robotic tools, connected devices for home use, 3D printing, AI, smaller implants are the emerging technological areas in healthcare.

He referred to major healthcare startups in India, many successful case studies in healthcare startups and mentioned how the Innovaccer, a Noida-based startup emerged as the first Indian unicorn in the healthcare sector. He said a huge market opportunity exists for healthcare startups. He cited recent studies by inc42 plus and said Indian healthcare market is estimated to reach $21 billion by 2025. This is only 3.3 per cent of the total addressable healthcare market pegged to reach $638 billion by 2025.

Prof Purushotham addressed the participants from 14 countries in the e-itech online training programme organised from March 22 to 26 on promotion of startups in the healthcare sector by National Institute for MSME (NI-MSME), Hyderabad.

The programme was sponsored by Ministry of External Affairs.

Purushotham stated that due to the proactive government policies, India emerged as a third largest startup ecosystem in the world. Among the different types of startups, healthcare startups occupy the second position in India.

The expert said as per Nasscom-2021 report on data and analytics (14.1 per cent), health (8.7 per cent) and education startups (8 per cent) occupy the top three slots and there are about 12,500 tech startups. As many as 1,600 startups were added in 2020.

He explained that a large number of innovative healthcare technologies are available from public funded R&D Institutions under DSIR, CSIR, DBT, DST, ICMR and IITs.

He said premier academic institutions and national laboratories have developed a large number of innovative technologies to address the Covid-19 pandemic challenges in testing, tracing and treatment which are being commercialised by many new startups and MSMEs using various government funding programmes under DST, DBT and NRDC.

Under the Startup India Mission, manufacturing clusters for medical devices have been established by the government in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, AP MedTech Zone (AMTZ) in Visakhapatnam is one among them.