Deadline: 19-Nov-23
The India Health Fund is calling for proposals for cutting-edge digital health innovations aimed at addressing crucial gaps within primary healthcare.
The central mission is to identify and support pioneering solutions that can dramatically improve access to high-quality healthcare, with a specific focus on underserved communities in low- and middle-income geographies in India.
Digital health innovations have the potential to revolutionize healthcare by offering solutions that significantly enhance efficiency and alleviate the overall workload of healthcare professionals. These innovations serve as a cornerstone for capacity building by providing healthcare workers with the tools and resources they need to deliver top-notch patient care.
The latest call for proposals welcomes a broad spectrum of digital innovations, ranging from those in pre-clinical and clinical validation stages. They are seeking innovations that require development, validation, and scaling support at or above TRL-5.
India Health Fund will support innovations that are focused on addressing infectious diseases, as well as system-level solutions that optimize continuum of care within the context of infectious diseases. Join them in this transformative journey to reshape the landscape of healthcare and make a lasting impact on global health. Your innovative digital solution could be the key to unlocking new possibilities and ensuring access to quality healthcare for all.
Focus Areas
- Proposals can address a wide range of primary healthcare challenges using digital technologies including digital innovations with and without diagnostic integration (digitally enabled technologies). They have identified the following focus areas:
- Surveillance and Infectious Diseases Data Analytics
- Surveillance for climate sensitive diseases (like dengue, malaria) and genomic surveillance tools to understand geographical distribution of disease and pathogen burden, and plan for effective outbreak response management.
- Forecasting: Tools for tracking and forecasting susceptible and vulnerable populations/patients for detecting disease incidence, prevalence, and outbreaks.
- Data modelling: Models, tools, analytics platforms, and other data-driven approaches to fill the knowledge and practice gaps in epidemiological understanding of disease transmission.
- Decision making: Innovations that can help in collecting patient information, collating data from private stakeholders in the communicable diseases’ space and integrating it with public health systems for strengthening disease notification and driving data-based decision making.
- Screening and Diagnosis
- Screening: Safe, non-invasive, digital tools for active and intensified case finding of diseases at community level. Innovations that can be utilized by minimally trained personnel in primary healthcare settings, especially with high disease burden and vulnerable populations are essential for early disease detection.
- Fast turnaround time: Easy-to-use, point-of-care digitally connected screening technologies with high throughput and fast report generation.
- Telepathology for better reach: Digital pathology/ mobile microscopy/ image processing / computer-assisted technologies to improve access to screening.
- Innovative strategies, tools, technologies, and methods for diagnostics and surveillance of antimicrobial resistance.
- Novel or improved rapid and affordable diagnostic technologies, including point-of-care diagnostics for accurate detection of bacterial/fungal infection and/ or resistance patterns. The technology could help in identifying the most effective antimicrobial treatment.
- Innovative strategies to optimize the use of tools, technologies, and methods for diagnostic data capture and usage.
- Care Pathways
- Electronic health record systems (EHR) and decision support tools for primary care providers.
- Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E): Data analytics and monitoring tools for health system management, remote patient monitoring and contact tracing for disease control and prevention.
- Supply chain and logistics: innovative solutions to effectively manage supply chain of drugs, vaccines, devices, consumables, and other medical products, from procurement to consumer.
- Treatment adherence: User-friendly, reliable, and patient-centric Digital Adherence Technologies (DATs), which can be used in resource-limited settings for increasing adherence to treatment.
- Health Systems Strengthening
- Aggregators: Digital platform technologies for streamlining and aggregating public health products, activities, services, and end-to-end delivery.
- Capacity building: Machine learning algorithms retrofitted with workflow, processes, knowledge center, trainings and data points required for daily activities of allied healthcare workers and Frontline workers.
- Platform integration: Interoperable data platforms and tools for eption, storage and seamless exchange of patient information, while ensuring privacy along with integration of different platforms for efficient patient data management.
- Effective data capture and management tools: Innovations that can capture manual data and digitize it either in facility or on field. Innovations for data management that promote data-based decision making.
- Solutions to align different procurement data systems in a secure manner to maintain data interoperability amongst key stakeholders.
- Solutions for enhanced public health communication, awareness, and education.
- Surveillance and Infectious Diseases Data Analytics
Program Offerings
- Milestone-based funding support.
- Need-based mentoring/workshops/knowledge building by a panel of experts for guidance on study design and validation, deployment, regulatory landscape and approvals, patent law, market access, and current policies.
- Collective engagement with public/private stakeholders and access to the public health ecosystem.
- Access to resources for adoption by the national health system and accelerated market adoption including support for enabling validation through pilots, and advisory on go-to-market strategy.
- Access to Health economics and research, evaluation of outcomes and metanalysis for innovation development and implementation to analyze cost effectiveness of investments in public health.
Eligibility Criteria
- Applications must be submitted by entities registered and incorporated in India.
- The proposal is relevant and aligned to at least one of the problem statements.
- Applicants should be sharing relevant data, including validation/pilot data for evaluation of the innovation. The innovation should have the potential for scale-up across diverse settings.
- Multi-disease platform solutions are preferred.
- It is desirable that the innovation (if applicable) is easily integrable with the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM).
For more information, visit India Health Fund.