Forus Health as the name stands for means Affordable health "For us". Our vision is to provide affordable technology solutions including new products that address India's unique health care delivery needs. Forus products and solutions are centered on the premise of enabling preventive screening even in remote villages and serviced by minimally trained field worker.
Our flagship innovation is 3nethra- An intelligent pre-screening ophthalmic solution that can identify common eye problems that is reason for 90% avoidable blindness in India.
Website:
http://www.forushealth.com•App 12 million classified blind people are in India out of 39M globally and over 80% is preventable.
•Cataract, Diabetic Retina, glaucoma, cornea issues and Refraction problems constitute 90% of blindness. They do not show any early signs and is often too late for treatment. This combined with illiteracy, scalability, rural reach magnifies the problem multifold.
• Only 14000 ophthalmologists practice in India and a mere 800 ophthalmologists graduate every year. Ophthalmologist to patient ratio is approximately 1: 70000. It is much worse in rural India.
•Identification of problem is the biggest bottleneck even for bigger hospitals to direct appropriate treatment. Only around 7% of people at various stages of blindness are screened and treated as of date.
The need is to also engage the community in enabling reach and hence any solution built has to be used by the community for the community with minimum infrastructure and hospital infrastructure needs.Current solutions do not satisfy this since all devices and solutions are built for hospital and its network improving an already efficient service within hospital infrastructure that has still not reached rural India and other developing countries. The need is to enable funneling of patients to the hospital ecosystem at a very negligible cost and focus on preventive screening for identifying problems even before patients experience visual symptoms
3nethra - A Single, portable, Intelligent, non-invasive, non-mydriatic eye pre-screening device, detects 5 major ailments of eye automatically – cataract, glaucoma, diabetic retina, cornea problems and provides refraction measurements.
•Decision making is carried out by the device through Automatic Screening algorithms and provides “OK-See a Doctor” Report for the above problems.
•Connectivity through communication infrastructure including mobile and broadband for remote diagnosis by specialists by transmitting images.
•Datacenter solutions will connect the entire eye care ecosystem to the patient thus making eye care available at patients doorstep.Helps create improved service offering from all existing players in the eye care ecosystem by extending their service offering with very minimum cost and infrastructure.
Most importantly enables mass screening outside hospital environment , operated by a minimally trained technician to help funnel patients to hospital ecosystem. This enables doctors spend quality time with patients and focus on treatment rather than screening.Such a solution can immediately offer benefits like providing eye screening apart from ophthalmology hospitals to diagnostic center, diabetic center, general practitioner(leverage general practitioners for screening),vision centers,mobile vans etc and have this in any primary health center.A rural entrepreneur can provide this service,earn livelihood and also help solve a problem
Impact - How do we democratize eye screening?
•Device is the pivot point and key enabler in the eye care value chain – Head Hunt Device
•Our key differentiation is that we do not provide a low cost device. We provide complete solution.
•A minimally trained technician (1-2 weeks of training) in the absence of an ophthalmologist can operate this device in a rural environment enabling pre-screening at patient’s doorstep.
•Rural patients get preventive screening before it is too late for treatment
•Increases coverage to all sections of population at reduced cost.
•Can easily scale through collaboration of the entire eye care ecosystem thereby making ophthalmic service available to all
•Our deployment ecosystem augments current delivery systems like hospitals (outreach, camps) NGO’s, Government, Rural entrepreneur etc and hence can be easily integrated into the existing ecosystem and creates new avenues that can potentially scale the existing ecosystem as well.
•We extensively use technology though telemedicine, ophthalmic datacenter etc in providing better and cost effective reach to rural villages.
•Vision centers, CSC centers are the targeted deployment environment enabling better eye related health outcomes that are more accessible to the remotest of Indian population.
•Creates continuous employment for a rural entrepreneur making economic sense along with social reach – Inclusive Growth
•Collaboration with NGO’s and other institutions to subsidize cost of screening, treatment – effect can be multifold
Our current competitors make individual devices for diagnostics and treatment. It includes global players like Topcon, Carl Zeiss, Canon etc. All of them focus on the ophthalmology hospital segment. Our device can be used in Ophthalmology hospitals, clinics, and also in Diabetic clinics, General Physicians, vision centers, mobile vans etc. Since it focuses on screening , it can be deployed in remote villages and can be connected to an ophthalmologist through telemedicine. Since the focus is on screening, we will complement the existing players, since for every 10 3nethra's sold, we will need one diagnostic device to help solve the problem.
This can also be used as a self operated tool in developed world enabling screening at kiosks.
Challenges: Pre-screening is a new concept in hospital environment and legislation across countries can vary. We have kept this in mind and only provide auto- prescreening algorithm for a go-no go. It is not a diagnostic reading to say a person has a,b,c problem.
high end devices are used within hospital environment and since 3nethra will be used outside a hospital environment, we may not have a direct competition.
All developing markets need this solution and we should make it more and more portable and easy to use.
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