Healthcare Club at the Indian School of Business (ISB) recently organised its sixth Healthcare and Pharma Conclave 2010 that was initiated in 2005, the flagship event of the healthcare club is also the first student-led industry summit to be held in India. The event has broken new ground in bringing together professionals from the pharmaceutical, biotech, healthcare and IT industry to a common platform. The theme for this year’s conclave was 'Managing change and innovation’.

It was an apt theme because healthcare and pharmaceuticals industries are experiencing and will continue to experience a sea of change over the coming decade. Innovations in service delivery models, efficiency of delivery, strategic alliances and regulation will be the drivers of this change. The healthcare and pharma conclave tried to explore each of these drivers to understand how they can be managed in the coming decade.

The event provided great opportunity for every student who dreams of taking up leadership positions in the industry which has always been referred to as the sunshine sector. Be it any area-pharmaceutical, biotechnology, health-care consulting, PE, and VC–this industry continues to grow at the speed of light.

The event began with the finals of the B-strat competition brought to ISB by Medium Healthcare Consulting. Four teams of ISB students presented their strategies to a team of three judges from Medium, which included the its CEO, Ratan Jalan. Following this was the speaker session where four eminent speakers from different areas of expertise in the healthcare and pharma industry shared their vision with ISB students. The one thing these four leaders had in common was that they are all change leaders in their own right.

Dr Perumal Namperumalsamy, chairman, Aravind Eye Hospitals, who was listed among the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine this year, described how a factory efficiency model can be extrapolated to hospitals to make them more effective. He is well known for bringing assembly-line efficiency to eye surgery and for eradicating a major burden of blindness in this country.

The second speaker Dr Ajai Kumar, the chairman and chief executive officer, Healthcare Global (HCG Enterprises Limited), touched the chord of entrepreneurship with the students. He spoke about how physician-led initiatives can go a long way in taking healthcare service to the masses, especially in developing countries like India. HCG is well known as the leading oncology care and research institution in India and currently manages nine cancer centres across the country.

Dr Malathi Lakshmikumaran, who heads the Life Science Patents division at the law firm Lakshmi Kumaran & Sridharan, and has previously headed the Centre for Bio-resources and Biotechnology at Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi, spoke in detail about the significance of patents and innovations in the healthcare world and the roles each play in the cost and revenue models. Dr Lakshmikumaran, with more than 25 years experience in the field of molecular biology, has been focusing is on patents related to biotechnology, bio-informatics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Ranjit Shahani president of Novartis India shared with the students his vision of the pharmaceutical industry on how it has evolved in India and what the future looks like. Each talk was followed by an engaging and interactive question and answer session between the students and the speaker.

The post lunch session of the healthcare and pharma conclave 2010 consisted of two workshops--one each on healthcare delivery and pharmaceuticals. The healthcare delivery workshop helped the students understand several aspects about the Indian healthcare industry: the keys gaps, the likely emergent trends, the new business models. A comparative case study to highlight critical success factors was discussed. The workshop was conducted by Dr Rakesh Kapur, a medical doctor by profession, who has been associated with Ernst & Young and was responsible for setting up their Healthcare Consultancy Practice. He is a core member of task force set up by Ministry of Health & Family welfare for PPP in healthcare. He engaged the students in an interactive session, and helped them understand the unique characteristics of the healthcare delivery market and its future.

The pharma workshop conducted by Dr Anil Gandhi, Rubicon Research, was a interactive workshop on pharmaceutical life cycle management which helped students get a holistic view of the drug development process in pharma/biotech and the role of CROs, hospitals, doctors, retail pharmacies etc in providing a framework for drug development. Dr Gandhi spoke about the role that entrepreneurial ventures can play in this growth in India, the challenges involved and the key decisions that are made through the drug development process and the management of intellectual property. He also gave the students a brief overview of the roles that MBA grades expect/play in this industry (entrepreneurial as well as in big pharma) and the expected career growth.