WISH Foundation and USAID jointly announced a 5-point strategic agenda to improve the primary healthcare delivery system and make a healthy India at the WISH Healthcare Innovations Summit at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi.

First, identify the 300-500 most promising healthcare innovations and help scale them up. Second, raise a $200 million fund to help finance these innovators. Third, work closely with the governments of 6-8 priority and under-served states to strengthen their primary healthcare delivery system using innovative approaches. Fourth, develop a national ecosystem for ongoing, large-scale healthcare innovation and fifth, build a knowledge hub to support high-impact innovators.

Sunil Wadhwani, founder donor, WISH Foundation, said “We want to provide a sustainable healthcare delivery system to the people at the base of the pyramid. The driving force to achieve the agenda of positive transformation is the public private partnership (PPP) which allows an integrated approach to strengthen primary healthcare by combining the public sector financial and infrastructure resources and public health metrics and private sector efficiencies and innovative approaches and solutions to compliances to best practices and standards”.

Historically, the primary healthcare sector has been resistant to change, and it has been hard to persuade people to adopt new techniques, new approaches, and new ways of thinking. WISH, with its innovative disruption, supported 12 innovators to demonstrate their innovations within the government health system in partnership with the government of Rajasthan. WISH has already deployed USD 2 million in last one year in the development of healthcare innovations. WISH took the management control of 30 PHCs and 153 SCs in Rajasthan which were underperforming due to manpower shortage, poor monitoring and management. WISH brought in local and national NGOs to provide services free of cost with private medical and paramedical staff following IPHS and state government guidelines. The success of this model can be replicated in other states in association with the respective state governments. The success of the model will only complete with the integration of healthcare innovators, government officials, private sector executives, funders, NGOs and technical experts so that they can connect, share ideas and collaborate. The above can only be achieved if an open-source database of stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, government programs, service providers, donors and investors, and corporate/commercial partners; a database of high-impact healthcare interventions and an assessment of their impact, sustainability and scalability; Sector research reports that inform constituents within this ecosystem and policy recommendations for government officials and legislators, to become a knowledge hub to support high-impact innovations.

Soumitro Ghosh, CEO, WISH Foundation, said “WISH association with Rajasthan government has proved that PPP can deliver a strong, efficient primary healthcare delivery system with early, door step diagnosis and preventive care, can not only reduce out of pocket expenditure on health, but it can also help India keep its commitments in terms of reduction of maternal and infant deaths and reducing the burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) besides impacting on overall social indicators e.g. poverty reduction, improved quality of life etc”.

WISH Foundation and USAID share a common goal of building an innovation-led primary healthcare system that can offer high quality, affordable healthcare services to help India meet its global commitments on RMNCH+A, TB and HIV/AIDS indicators, reduce out of pocket expenditure on health and simultaneously create an ecosystem to scale up promising, hi-impact healthcare innovations, garnering partnerships, matching resources towards strengthening the primary healthcare delivery system.

Wadhwani said, “I believe that over the next 10 years, these initiatives will change the face of the public health in India removing the age old miseries of over 800 million living in India villages and urban slums. WISH is committed to build an online interactive knowledge hub for public use in partnership with USAID in the coming year. The envisioned new ecosystem can change the lives of millions of individuals and families in the poorest regions of India – and, will demonstrate the ways to do the same in the world’s other developing countries”.