In a bid to offer quick and affordable diagnosis of heart diseases in India, GE Healthcare has introduced ‘Mac I’ ECG equipment. The equipment, a portable and easy-to-operate system, is part of the company’s healthymagination commitment where price for the patient is Rs 9 compared to the existing costs of Rs 50 or Rs 75 per patient.

To ensure that medical entrepreneurs can have access to this product, the company has tied up with State Bank of India (SBI) to offer financial assistance. It will soon provide comprehensive training to doctors and paramedics to garner the ECG reading skills. This will be suitable to remote villages where a cardiologist is hard to find, said V Raja, president & CEO, GE Healthcare South Asia.

Earlier, GE Healthcare’s ECG system MAC 400 was offered at 1/3rd the price of the imported versions. MAC I will cost Rs.25000. A physician or hospital will have to spend only Rs 27 per day EMI to own the same over a three year period.

As part of the ‘healthymagination’ initiative, the company is developing at least 100 innovations to reduce the cost of procedure. ‘The Mac I’ is part of the product portfolio of ‘In India, For India’ range which includes MAC 400, Lullaby baby warmer.

Over 73 per cent of India's population lives in rural areas today but nearly 80 per cent of the healthcare providers, especially specialists are clustered in urban centers, making the situation even worse. Patients have to travel long distances to meet experts and patients succumb before reaching a medical centre. Early detection is key to tackling heart disease. Measuring the electrical activity of the heart through an ECG is the first step in early detection of cardiac disease. Acute shortage of experts, unavailability of appropriate technology and high costs have been a big barrier to making this a reality, said GE Healthcare South Asia chief.

The company has also donated the first MAC i unit to HelpAge India to facilitate early cardiac detection for elderly patients in sub-urban areas.

Key features of MAC i are its single channel ECG system capable of printing in three channels at the same time. ECG can be printed line by line per page or three lines on one page. It can complete 500 3-channel ECGs or 250 single channel ECGs for every three hour battery charge, which equals one month of operation in a village where availability of electricity is a major constraint. It is particularly suited for rural India where healthcare is delivered through Primary Health Clinics or individual physician clinics. The product comes with the highly accurate and clinically proven Marquette 12SL analysis program. MAC i will be show-cased at the Cardiological Society of India congress from December 2 to 5, 2009 at Cochin, India.