A Vaidheesh, managing director, Johnson & Johnson Medical India (J&J), shares with Soma Das of FE, the strides his firm has made in reverse innovation. He also talks about the advantages India can reap by following the Singapore healthcare model in the regulatory space.

Your peers GE, Phillips and Siemen have been extremely bullish on ?reverse innovation? lately, innovating products for India in their R&D hubs within the country and then scaling them up globally. J&J has been relatively quiet on that front. Why?

We have just not talked about developments on reverse innovation, but the truth is there is a lot of India specific innovation happening in the company, which is finding market across the globe. Our glucometer ? One touch Horizon, which is available for less than R1,000 here, was designed completely in India with the inputs of a distinguished set of Indian doctors. The same is marketed in US under brand One Touch UltraMini at a comparable price point and actually became a hot-selling item in the US market. Similarly our surgical staplers Advant 55 was developed in India, but later found huge markets in China, Russia and Brazil. We will be launching by the end of the year a specific technology that would make shifting patients from one bed to the other in the hospital much safer and much easier. You know the lengths such an innovation can go to in preventing accidents in hospitals. That technology is an Indian innovation from scratch, in fact by a team with participation from AIIMS, IIT Mumbai and Stanford University. And I am sure this would find takers across the world. Also, you would also see us upscaling our R&D efforts around Mumbai in times to come.

As an integrated healthcare company, what is the biggest challenge you have faced in the Indian regulatory landscape?

That we have no healthcare regulator and we have eight or nine ministries handling fragmented bits of the healthcare continnum, which results in a complete lack of a concerted national strategy to address healthcare issues.

All this ultimately leads to a single scary consequence ? a dissatisfied patient and caregivers. That is why we have proposed a ?healthcare promotion board? on the lines of what Singapore government does. It would be a comprehensive body that coordinates with different ministries on the entire gamut of issues related to healthcare ? the hardware, software ? starting from drugs, price control, health insurance, medical education, patient grievances, medical ethics, even health tourism. In fact, we need a Nasscom for healthcare industry, if a national level concerted healthcare strategy is to be formulated.

In your capacity as the chairman of Ficci medical electronics forum, what are the some of the issues that you are taking up with the government for medical technology firms?

The one thing we are in talks now with the government, which concerns more with the local manufacturing industry is that in most cases imported products come out to be cheaper than products which are manufactured within the country. That kills incentive to set up manucaturing facilities and proves detrimental to the health of the local industry. The revenue secretary has been apprised of the issue, is looking into it and may resolve it favourably.

How are the public-private-partnertships with states coming up?

Some states such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat are doing a tremendous job at it. Others such as Kerala, Maharashtra are doing good job, too.

But are those models sustainable in the long term?

I think it is. We have just done thousands of knee replacement surgeries for the Tamil Nadu government under its below poverty line programmes. Maharashtra will be rolling similar schemes in near future. In such models, the margins of the health insurance firms, may go down 5-15%, but they would still make money. But PPP is the right, may be the only way to answer the questions in healthcare. The government is better off being the payer than the provider in healthcare.