Eyeing the burgeoning need to build innovations, scale up quickly and accelerate growth, IBM is empowering the next generation of healthcare start-ups that develop solutions to solve the most complex health problems in the country.

The primary focus for IBM is to recognize start-ups in various domains and help them to scale-up. In 2016, through its IBM Smartcamp for Health Tech challenge, an exclusive programme it identified for start-ups in the B2B and B2C space.

“We see the need to redefine the healthcare industry in India through start-up technology innovations. Among our various initiatives is the IBM Global entrepreneur program where start-ups are given IBM Cloud credits worth USD $12,000 to leverage IBM cognitive , IBM Cloud and business mentorship to scale their business”, Seema Kumar, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystem & Startups, IBM told Pharmabiz in a email.

At the IBM Smartcamp for Health Tech challenge in 2016, the winner was Oxyent Technologies, a start-up working on IoT, Cloud and Big Data technology to improve doctor-parent engagement through continuous and personalized child health monitoring. UE Life Sciences and DailyRounds emerged as runner ups.

“Our agenda is not to drive revenue generation for these start-ups. Instead, we embed them into IBM’s vast global network of enterprise clients, consultants, and innovation centers to rapidly build innovations, scale quickly and accelerate growth. Our SmartCamp initiative is also a platform to interact with top investors and healthcare domain mentors in India,” she added.

The solutions by both Oxyent Technologies and Medibox are innovative and are likely to transform the healthcare scenario in the country in the future. Millions of infants die in India annually either due to lack of timely information and human error involved during treatments.

Oxyent has devised a solution which enhances the doctor-patient engagement by continuous monitoring of health personalized to each child. It has maximised IoT and analytics to provide a real-time dashboard to the healthcare professionals, which enable timely decisions.

Now Medibox makes medicines available to retailers anytime, anywhere across India. It digitally connects retail and hospital pharmacies to distributors and stockists resulting in an efficient and fast supply chain management. The cloud-based solution with a mobile application is compatible with any portable device. It also works with manufacturers and marketing companies, to provide a suite of solutions to communicate launches, offers and schemes across the supply chain.

“These are pertinent problems being solved keeping in mind the unique requirements in India. We believe these start-ups are tapping the potential of cutting edge technologies to significantly enhance the user experience and improve lives,” said IBM’s Developer Ecosystem & Start-ups chief.

In order to accelerate technology innovations in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India, IBM partnered with the Indian Angel Network (IAN). This enables working with IBM IX Studios program to explore new dimensions of next-gen technologies like Cloud, Cognitive, Analytics, IoT, and Mobility. In addition, IAN and IBM will work on various joint initiatives, to further technology innovation, offer mentorship and funding support to early stage start-ups, to scale business both in terms of technology and newer business engagements.

Further, IBM collaborated with Kstart, an initiative of Indian venture capital firm Kalaari Capital, to provide offer training and mentoring sessions . Kstart’s entire roster of seed-stage portfolio companies can apply for the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program, for business mentoring, technical support, networking with enterprise clients to help entrepreneurs build applications on IBM Cloud.