Bodhi Health Education was founded in 2014 by Abhinav Girdhar and Shrutika Girdhar with a vision of improving the quality of healthcare professionals in India thereby improving the patient care outcomes for the healthcare providers.
The Idea- The motivation behind this was our first hand experience with the limited access to basic healthcare in our remote hometown in rural Maharashtra due to lack of doctors and nurses. While Abhinav had worked previously for more than 9 years in healthcare consulting with firms like Deloitte, PwC and Intellecap, Shrutika’s came with rich technology consulting experience with Tata Consultancy and British Telecom, UK. Given the solid background and experience both the founders were convinced about the idea and decided to pursue it further.
The health workforce in India today is plagued by 3 key issues of quality, scarcity and under-utilisation. 57% of the allopathic doctors in urban India do not have medical qualification and the number is much worse in rural areas. India produces 0.2 million nurses and paramedics annually but the demand will exceed 5 million by 2020. About 50% of the existing medical workforce does not practice which adversely impacts the health workforce density per population.
Adressing Issues Like- Bodhi is trying to solve the problem of sourcing skilled manpower and talent development for healthcare industry with the use of technology. They develop game based courses, demonstrative and e-learning videos, and interactive assessments which are delivered over multiple and connected devices like mobile, tablets or desktops.
Over 18000 healthcare professionals today are using Bodhi's platform in different areas like infection control, critical care, maternal and child health and soft skills.
Their clients include leading healthcare providers like All India Institute of Medical Sciences New-Delhi, Columbia Asia Group of hospital , SNM public hospital J&K. We have also partnered with UP governments mSehat initiative, one of the largest mobile based initiative to educate around 12,000 health workers in 5 major districts.
At a larger scale the immediate impact will be to improve the quality of the healthcare professionals about to join the industry and those already working in the industry. The long term impact will be to help build capacity for medical and nursing colleges which suffer from lack of faculty and can use Bodhi's learning aids to scale up.
The Indian healthcare industry lags far behind in its adoption of technology which has resulted in the the 12th five year plan to incorporate it in a holistic way for electronic medical records, telemedicine and healthcare payments. Thus as more healthcare providers start adopting technology, we see our digital learning solutions disrupting the medical and nursing education landscape in India.
On the Investment Front Bodhi received equity investment in 2015 from IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship and Village Capital fund, USA. Some of our distinguished angel investors include Professor or Public Health from National University of Singapore, a partner with A.T Kearney, Singapore and an ex director of Goldman Sachs.
Future Plans & Vision- Further Bodhi received investment and incubation support from IIM Calcutta Innovation Park. It was one among 8 start-ups selected globally by Duke University under SEAD program and is also part of the Innovations in Healthcare network formed by McKinsey, Duke Medicine and World Economic Forum.
Recently Bodhi was also selected by IFC’s Tech Emerge program as one among 16 healthcare innovators globally to work with larger Indian healthcare providers which include NephroPlus dialysis chain and Eye-Q specialty chain of hospitals. Bodhi was also one among the 8 finalists at the IBM smartcamp health tech initiative 2016.
With some of the best clinical educators and a strong technology team we aim to create valuable medical education products and reach 60,000 healthcare professionals by the end of 2017.
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
