Description of Innovation

Though 70 percent of India’s population live in rural areas, healthcare access in rural communities is scarce. A significant lack of physicians, poor infrastructure, long travel times, and lack of health financing create challenges to accessing care. Point-of-care technologies enable community-based health workers (CHWs) to provide doorstep healthcare monitoring and diagnostic support. Through this model, CHWs can provide personalized, specific and professional care to rural residents, including primary care support, maternal and child health services, nutrition interventions, and telemedicine.

Since its founding in 2010, iKure has served more than 2.5 million direct beneficiaries across six states in India in more than 1,000 villages. Presently, iKure has profiled approximately 58 diseases and trained more than 150 CHWs. Through iKure’s model, patients’ wait time for care is dramatically reduced from four to six-hour wait times in local health clinics, to within one hour of contact.