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

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Anurag Mairal, director of technology solutions at PATH Health Technologies, says that it’s time to start looking at low-cost innovations in healthcare differently. What should the road map be for an innovation? Should the product debut in a developing country first and then, evolve for the developed market or vice versa?

“We’re at a point now, that companies cannot just keep adding bells and whistles to the same product to garner sales,” Mairal told me.

So, given the increasing costs of healthcare in the U.S. and in Europe, companies are looking increasingly at simpler solutions that have the capacity to criss-cross border with a few tweaks.

PATH is a Seattle-based non-profit. But it’s working with the commercial sector to scale, distribute, and market its innovations. That’s Mairal’s task. He’s a new addition to the PATH team, after a noted career with Johnson & Johnson companies. He is symbolic of this merger between social impact and commercial viability.