Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) has teamed up with Aster DM Healthcare to proactively support the mission’s innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives across the country with the aim of transforming the country’s healthcare infrastructure through innovations, NITI Aayog stated in a release.
Accordingly, AIM and Aster signed a Statement of Intent (SoI) for a strategic partnership to support the various initiatives of AIM programmes and AIM beneficiaries in India to promote innovation and entrepreneurship amongst the aspiring entrepreneurs in the area of digital healthcare.
A unit of Aster DM Healthcare Group, Aster Digital Health Incubator (ADHI) will play a major role in supporting various Atal Incubation Centers (AICs), Established Incubation Centres (EICs), Atal Community Innovation Centres (ACICs) and Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) amongst other initiatives of AIM within the country.
The goal is to deeply engage with AICs, EIC, and ATLs across the country to achieve milestones in the area of healthcare innovative solutions with a focus on digital primary care and establishing a rich eco-system of digital health entrepreneurship.
In accordance with SoI with AIM, Aster will also be providing access to Aster Clinical Simulation Lab, Aster Federated Learning Data bank for AI healthcare research, ADHI, Aster Digital Health Center of Excellence, and other relevant facilities to the startups under various AIM initiatives.
Mission director of AIM, NITI Aayog, R Ramanan while exchanging the virtual SoI with Aster, said “the partnership will transform healthcare ecosystem across the country.”
“Collaborative value-adding partnerships with the private sector and international organisations is key to AIM’s initiatives to boost innovation and entrepreneurship nationwide. The partnership of AIM with Aster will greatly add value in the efforts to innovate in India’s medical devices and healthcare ecosystem, leveraging advances in digital health research and innovation that Aster would enable,” he added.
Group chief of innovation and research, Dr Satish Prasad Rath, said, “Digital health powered by deep learning/AI has transformative ability to make healthcare accessible and affordable in India. Digital health startups often face the challenge of generating evidence of their utility as well focusing on the need felt by doctors and patients. With Aster’s clinical simulation lab, a unique initiative from Aster’s Innovation and Research Centre, startups can validate their models with real world data available at Aster Data Bank. Taking advantage of the hospital immersion programme startups can gain insights from nurses, doctors, health workers and CXOs which is going to be critical for their market adoption.”