NEW DELHI: India and Sweden are all set to scale up work on finding solutions focused around digital innovations to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. A health platform will be launched at the India-Sweden Business Summit on Tuesday to step-up work in the area.
The development is significant as Sweden and India on Monday started their first ever dialogue on innovation during the visit of Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia to India.
Business Sweden president and chief operating officer, Ylva Berg told TOI that a key focus of this platform will be on finding technological solutions to bring down prices and help doctors dealing with large number of patients with support systems that help them take decisions related to things like prescription of medicines. “This health platform will also explore ways to innovate through pilots and then scale up to reach out to more people,” Berg added.
To work on innovative solutions, this health platform will be tripartite collaboration between the Swedish trade commissioner’s office, All India Institute of Medical Sciences and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur (AIIMS Jodhpur), including knowledge partners such as AstraZeneca and NASSCOM.
This collaboration is being signed under the umbrella of the India Sweden Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in health and public health which celebrates 2019 as the 10th year of health cooperation between the countries. According to Business Sweden, the knowledge partners will bring their healthcare expertise, technology leadership and experience of running similar platforms globally and will complement the R&D expertise of AIIMS Delhi and Jodhpur.
“In keeping with the MoUs signed between Sweden and India, we at Business Sweden help Swedish companies to find partnerships in India,” Berg said as she pointed out that the idea is to share the Swedish experience, learn from the Indian experience and innovate based on the shared experience.
On Tuesday, at the India-Sweden Business summit where finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman is scheduled to deliver the inaugural speech, one of the parallel sessions will dwell on the theme “Health for all” and discuss ways to scale innovations to reach billions. Panel discussions are also planned around the themes “Make it in India” where the battle of supply chains, winning at innovation and succeeding in India will be in focus. At the Summit on Tuesday, a discussion will focus on “Digital India” and India’s role in the digital economy, propelled by both public and private sector investments.
