Pandemic Sets New Benchmarks For Early-Stage Healthcare Startups

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an enabler of this change as care-delivery models had to be quickly revamped to address two concerns – the diseases and the impacts of the virus on the treatment of other diseases. We aim to assess the qualitative and quantitative impact of COVID-19 and other macroeconomic events on the startup ecosystem over the last few years and try to understand the implications for the future.

- Nritya Ganesh

Nritya Ganesh, Director Program Management & India Edison Accelerator Program Leader, GE Healthcare, Bengaluru

With an unprecedented crisis looming around the world, the healthcare industry finds new ways to tackle the ongoing problems. The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unparalleled demands on modern healthcare systems, but the industry’s response has demonstrated its resilience and ability to bring healthcare innovations leveraging technology to market quickly.

This, however, is the culmination of years of development in digital technologies coupled with the reducing price of storage and computational power year-on-year which allowed users to process and analyse large volumes of unstructured data, yielding valuable insights. Business-model innovations by cloud infrastructure providers, viz. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure have brought these costs down even further through pay-as-you-go leasing models, democratizing access, and providing smaller players equivalent technological resources as a large enterprise.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an enabler of this change as care-delivery models had to be quickly revamped to address two concerns – the diseases and the impacts of the virus on the treatment of other diseases.