BCTA MEMBERSHIP STATUS
Active

SECTOR
Health, Information Communication & Technology (ICT)

HEADQUARTERS
India

REGION OF INITIATIVE
Asia & Pacific

SDG CONTRIBUTION

RELATED NEWS

iKure, a rapidly growing tech start up providing primary healthcare across rural, semi urban and urban populations in India joined Business Call to Action in December 2018 with a commitment to empower 5000 health entrepreneurs and deliver affordable health care to 25 million people across 11 Indian States.

Rural health is a global challenge, not only because primary health services are generally not accessible or affordable to rural communities, but also because of the lack of capacity to implement programmes that address rural health care needs in a harmonized and holistic way.

In India, 70 percent of the rural population (or over 840 million people) are served by less than 30 percent of the country’s combined medical force. This means there is one doctor per 19,000 people on average. Many families simply have no access to health care or are forced to rely on unreliable treatment plans and unqualified practitioners. Access to health care in rural communities is further complicated by long distances, lack of infrastructure, lack of education and poverty.

iKure addresses these challenges by operating through a hub-and-spoke clinic model, where a core medical team utilizing modern procedures and equipment are stationed at hub clinic. Trained community health workers, who are selected and trained from each village, then visit peripheral clinics (spokes) on a regular basis and provide reliable access to on-site general medicine, maternal and child health care, eye care, telemedicine services, and pathology services to cater to the demand of specific diseases. After six months in the programme, community health workers become self-sustaining entrepreneurs, who generate income through selling and promoting products from the iKure supply chain.

Technology forms a key part of iKure’s impact, as it enables patient information to be captured by community health workers on point-of-care devices offline. The information is uploaded to cloud storage when health workers return to web-connected areas. This process facilitates early diagnosis and tertiary linkages otherwise non-existent in India’s remote settings. Equipped with this information, iKure analyzes the root causes of ailments and addresses them holistically through combination of health and hygiene, nutrition and other aspects. By doing this, iKure creates an ecosystem of spokes clinics for diagnosis and minor treatments, hospitals for secondary and tertiary care and research organisations for clinical and technical knowhow of various ailments.