In the middle of June, Acumen investee LifeSpring opened its second low-cost maternity hospital in a peri-urban area near Hyderabad. They plan to have six hospitals opened by the end of 2008, and by the time this post goes live, they will have launched their third hospital in Nellore, a small town in southern Andhra Pradesh.

As LifeSpring and other Acumen Fund investees slowly and steadily gain scale, we have started asking broader questions about healthcare for the low-income market. Mainly, we want to understand the major gaps and bottlenecks to providing healthcare to the low-income market in India and how these issues can be overcome. The India office is presently working on a status report of the healthcare sector in which we are trying to understand the challenges of the industry for our target market. What follows is a brief summary of our understanding thus far. Your feedback through questions, comments, nudges, pointers and criticism are appreciated.

Simply put, healthcare for the poor seems to have three central challenges: affordability, availability and quality. Effective, viable solutions will need to address all three issues.

A scalable and sustainable micro health insurance model will probably rank as the highest value intervention to address the issue of affordability, especially in a country like India where, according to India’s National Health Accounts, an estimated 72 percent of healthcare expenditures are out-of-pocket. The idea of pooling risk to prevent unexpected health shocks from forcing a family further into poverty is intuitive and micro health insurance has been in India for some years now.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 12:29 am and is filed under Mother’s Day at LifeSpring Hospital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.