Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality from noncommunicable diseases (NCD) in India. The government’s National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke seeks to increase capacity building, screening, referral, and management of NCDs across India and includes community-based outreach and screening programs. The government in India routinely provides basic care at religious mass gatherings. However, in 2015, at the Kumbh Mela in Nashik and Trimbakeshwar, the state government extended its services to include a hypertension-screening program. We examine here the value and implications of such opportunistic screening at mass gatherings. At the Kumbh, 5,760 persons voluntarily opted for hypertension screening and received a single blood pressure measurement. In all, 1,783 (33.6%) screened positive, of whom 1,580 were previously unaware of their diagnosis. Of the 303 that previously had hypertension, 240 (79%) were prescribed medications, and 160 were compliant (that is, 52.8% under treatment). Fifty-five (18%) had normal blood pressure readings (BP under control). The data also demonstrated higher prevalence (39%) of hypertension among tobacco users compared to non-users (28%) (P<0.001). Poor recording of phone numbers (0.01%) precluded any phone-based follow-up. The low rates of hypertension awareness, treatment, and control underscore the ongoing challenge of both hypertension screening and management in India.
Entrepreneurs in developing countries who assume they will have the same legal, governmental, and institutional protections as their counterparts in the West will fail. To succeed, they need to build trust within the existing structures—and this book shows how it's done.
New technologies can be unsettling for industry incumbents, regulators, and consumers, because norms and institutions for dealing with them don’t yet exist. Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and infrastructure is lacking. In this article, the author suggests that tech pioneers would do well to heed a lesson he’s gleaned from his research in the developing world: For long-term success, companies must invest in the surrounding ecosystem.
The author presents examples of entrepreneurs who have done just that in China, Bangladesh, Africa, and Chile, benefiting the public as well as their own enterprises. He then describes how an Indian health care organization is tackling institutional voids as it expands into medical tourism in the Cayman Islands. An in-depth look at the nascent drone industry follows, with profiles of companies that are helping create the conditions for the industry’s growth by amassing knowledge about best practices, influencing the development of regulations, exploring new uses for drones, developing a professional workforce, and so forth.
The argument is that when firms launching innovative products or services look beyond their self-interest and work to collectively build the institutional infrastructure, they—and society as a whole—are more likely to prosper.
