The India-Sweden Healthcare Innovation Centre, a collaboration between the Swedish Trade Commissioner’s Office, AIIMS Delhi and AIIMS Jodhpur, virtually launched its second edition of the healthcare innovation challenge. The innovation challenge is an opportunity for startups to collaborate with partners on the Innovation Centre platform to help solve some of the problems in the healthcare delivery landscape of India. This year’s healthcare innovation challenge focuses on solutions within COVID management and solutions for awareness and treatment of cardiovascular, renal, neuro, cancer and lung diseases. 

The application is open till October 10, 2021. All the applications will undergo a rigorous evaluation process by a panel of experts and include partners like AIIMS Delhi, AIIMS Jodhpur, ICMR, AstraZeneca, NASSCOM, CCamp, AIM, Invest India and various funding entities. 

Dr Randeep Guleria, Director, AIIMS Delhi said, “Frugal innovation to develop cost-effective and efficient ways of healthcare delivery is the key need for the Indian healthcare market. Innovators developing these solutions could leverage this platform and avail mentorship and guidance from our institute as well as the partners of the centre to develop solutions that would benefit our country.”

The selected startups will collaborate with the India-Sweden Healthcare Innovation Centre to enable faster scale-up, cross-country mentorship, access to state-of-the-art incubation centres located within AIIMS Jodhpur and NASSCOM Bangalore campus, lab facilities, guidance on funding, and the ability to ideate with like-minded innovators from across India and beyond. 

Ms Cecilia Oskarsson, Swedish Trade Commissioner to India said, “Covid has emphasized the need to have robust healthcare infrastructure across the countries and this could be achieved only through innovation. Therefore, the challenge would focus on innovative Digital Tools/Platforms - Med-Tech, Artificial Intelligence backed solutions that support new ways of working and improve the efficiencies of healthcare systems

Mr Gagandeep Singh Bedi, managing director, AstraZeneca Pharma India said, “It is our pleasure to partner with India-Sweden Healthcare Innovation Centre to support the ecosystem. We hope that this platform will help innovators, who are working hard to impact patients’ lives, to further develop their products/solutions to provide affordable and accessible healthcare to people in these difficult times.”