Rural E-Health Infrastructure Development - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 203

are a few main guidelines for major health care
innovations that can make them replicable:

a way of promoting the initial establishment
(Ehrbeck et al., 2010).

1. Getting closer to the patient: Distribution
costs and adherence to protocols can be sig-
nificantly improved by moving delivery of
health much closer to the home of patients.
Teaching local members of mainly poor com-
munities how to diagnose and cure simple
matters as well as providing the providers
with a “bag” of standardized required prod-
ucts and equipments is an option.
2. Using existing technology to provide new
delivery of services: Mobile phone systems,
other technologies as well as infrastructure
allows an extension of health care access,
increases the standardization and improves
productivity. Access to professional health
advice through mobile phone and triage or
diagnosis through similar means could prove
very efficient.
3. Workforce skill: Skills and training can
be tightly connected to the task at hand. If
there are a number of less qualified health
care workers (such as midwives) to over-
look the patients than a doctor can oversee
significantly more patients and costs can be
cut.
4. Standardization: Innovation is also about
using highly standardized procedures in
order to minimize waste and improve the
utilization of assets. Standardized clinical
protocols also increase the quality of health
care and the transfer of knowledge and
technology.
5. Using existing institutions: In order to re-
duce capital investment and operating costs,
existing institutions or networks can be used
and the savings passed on to the consumers
or to the enhancement of the system.
6. New revenue sources: Many of the health
care providers extend their activity into
other sectors to capture additional revenue
that are used to subsidize costs. This is also

Efficient innovators around the globe have
demonstrated effective new ways to reach and
interact with patients and treat them at lower
costs. The real challenge they faced was how to
implement, not how to invent. Here are a few cases
that adopted one or more of the strategies above
in order to create and implement successfully new
models of health care provision.

Bottom of the Pyramid

The first example is the “bottom of the pyramid”
(BOP) approach. First defined in 1998 by Profes-
sors C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart (Prahalad &
Hart, 2002), this approach presents low-income
markets as a prodigious opportunity for productive
and entrepreneurial potential, as well as untapped
demand for products and services. The group of
people that earn 8 $ or less per day are usually
excluded from the formal markets. BOP is usually
not on the radar of most business models because
of the changes in the environment, but models that
find new ways to overcome constraints and tap
new opportunities can gain a lot. They can improve
BOP incomes and improve their access to essen-
tial goods and services while reducing inequality
and multiplying the effect of their models (World
Economic Forum, 2009). In order to understand
BOP any model dealing with it should overcome
the usual barriers of business models and leverage
any existing problems into opportunities such as:
accepting access rather than ownership, monetiz-
ing hidden assets, bridging the gap i public goods
through private enterprises, scaling out instead of
scaling up, governing through influence rather
than authority.

Social Business Modeling

Another example is the social business model ap-
plied to the Grameen Bank, which was awarded