14 healthcare start-ups win India-Sweden Innovation Center’s innovation challenge

The India-Sweden Healthcare Innovation Center virtually announced 14 healthcare start-ups as the winners of the innovation challenge. It had focused on innovative solutions in eight challenge areas including Digital Tools/Platforms – Med Tech; Telemedicine; and Artificial Intelligence backed solutions to support new ways of working to improve the efficiencies of healthcare systems as they manage the pandemic.

The competition aimed to identify and support creative solutions that can impact the treatment of non-communicable and communicable diseases and help regress critical problems in the healthcare delivery landscape of India.

The winning start-ups will now work with the India-Sweden Healthcare Innovation Center platform which will enable faster scale-up. It will provide them access to cross-country mentorship, guidance on funding, and ability to ideate with like-minded innovator, and access to state-of-the-art incubation centre located within AIIMS Jodhpur campus. Moreover, onboarded start-ups can also avail the incubation facility at NASSCOM, Bengaluru.

The India-Swedeb-Healthcare Innovation Center is designed to enable and implement the shared vision of developing innovative solutions, aiming to solve various healthcare problems that exist in the country. As part of the initiative, the start-ups, as well as the partner organizations will work towards the shared vision of propelling and integrating innovative healthcare solutions into the ecosystem to bring about progress in the way healthcare is delivered or managed currently.

Anders Tofte, Swedish Trade Commissioner to India, said they aim to enable cross country collaboration between innovators for effective exchange of knowledge and best practices between both the countries. “Start-ups will be able to co-create, explore solutions from multiple angles and be able to scale-up across borders,” he explained.

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Dr Randeep Gulleria, Director AIIMS Delhi, said local innovation combined with global experience is very important to develop effective and scalable innovations in healthcare. “We are confident that the holistic approach of India-Sweden Healthcare Innovation Centre will enable an impactful engagement with the winners announced. Dr Sanjeev Misra, AIIMS Jodhpur, said the new normal has shown that innovative thinking is more needed than before.

And Leif Johansson, non-executive Chairman AstraZeneca PLC, pointed out that there is a requirement to establish an incubation of providers with diverse expertise who can bring relevant, meaningful innovative solutions that can foster holistic management of non-communicable diseases. “With its vast array of innovation centres across the globe and experience of working with innovators in India, AstraZeneca as knowledge partner to this collaboration will bring experience and expertise that start-ups can leverage for faster scale-up.”