NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, March 24, 2016

India’s emergency medical response system has long been criticized for being slow and unresponsive. While the public sector has not openly supported change within the system, the private sector is now yielding new technologies, such as AMBER Health – which has set out to change how Indians deal with emergency medical situation in an Uber-like fashion.

The country’s total GDP expenditure on healthcare is about 1.2%, indicating that emergency medical transport is not on the priority list for many hospitals – especially those under government funding.

This level of public under-funding coupled with disorganized and congested roads, has meant that the wait for an ambulance can be long. Furthermore, time ticks on when upon reaching a hospital, emergency medical staff have no idea about the patient’s medical history and have to figure that out before attending to the problem in hand.

It’s a problem that a set of entrepreneurs decided that they would try to solve through creating an aggregation system, stumbling upon the idea almost by accident.