BPL Healthcare has teamed up with Welch Allyn, a leading global manufacturer of frontline medical products and solutions, to strengthen its presence in the Asian region.

The partnership will provide easy access for medical practitioners, hospitals and the public health system at large in India. As per the Memorandum of Understanding , BPL Healthcare will serve as a Welch Allyn master distributor, putting the company closer to its prospective customers and better positioning it to provide innovative products that meet the growing needs of healthcare professionals in that part of the world.

"Since BPL has a comprehensive service and delivery systems in the country, the strategic alliance provides us with a tremendous opportunity to tap into a ready and reliable network to support sales, service and logistics for our products. It will allow us to further broaden our reach in a country that has one of the largest and fastest growing healthcare sectors in the region," said Con Hickey, senior vice president, Asia Pacific at Welch Allyn.

Primary healthcare centres in India remain ill-equipped. The e-Clinic, concept developed jointly by Welch Allyn and BPL, is designed as a state-of-art family health clinic, using world class diagnostic instruments. The e-Clinic will have facilities for general health check up and will be equipped with all Welch Allyn made front-line diagnostic products and BPL made imaging products.

This will also serve as a training centre for doctors, medical students nurses on use of such equipment. e-Clinic, over the next few years will be replicated in different regions of the country. The primary goal of the e-Clinic would be to propagate the concept of a modern well-equipped clinic which will also serve as a guideline for doctors to set up their own clinics. The clinics will be telemedicine-enabled in future.

According to Ajit Nambiar, chairman and managing director, BPL Ltd., such a show and tell demonstration facility will showcase global trends of an empowered and connected General Practitioners clinic. The e-Clinic will represent a new paradigm as an integrated point of care or primary healthcare centre.

BPL Healthcare was established in 1967 as a division of the flagship BPL Ltd., manufacturing diagnostic medical equipment. It has design, development and manufacturing capabilities for diagnostic medical devices such as electrocardiographs, vital signs monitoring systems and defibrillators with manufacturing facilities in Bangalore, Palakkad and a nationwide sales, distribution and service network.

"Our main objective in this collaboration is to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of primary level diagnosis within a healthcare infrastructure that is heavily under-resourced," said Vijay Simha, chief operating officer of BPL Healthcare.

Under the partnership, the two companies also plan to launch an advocacy program to eliminate the use of toxic mercury from medical devices in India. "Mercury, one of the world's most ubiquitous and potent heavy metal neurotoxicants, has been an integral part of many medical devices, most prominently thermometers and sphygmomanometers. These devices break or routinely leak with regularity, adding to the global burden of mercury in the environment and exposing health care workers to the acute effects of the metal itself. The global health care sector is moving to replace mercury-based medical devices with affordable, accurate and safer alternatives," added Simha.