Ekohealth recently announced that Steve Doswell has joined the company as Chief Market Development Officer. Doswell has been COO of America Online (AOL) Canada and General Manager of Ericsson Canada. Of special relevance for Ekohealth is Doswell’s impressive history of working with start-ups in similar stages which Ekohealth is in now, and helping to develop them into commercial successes. Steve has already done this for three North American start-up companies: two of which raised their capital through high-profile IPO’s and all three of which were successfully sold to major North American corporations. His last company developed technology to allow for remote dispensing of prescription medicines through “ATM-like machines” and was recently bought by a major American pharmacy chain. As a result of introducing this pharmacy technology around the world, Doswell is well connected to the healthcare sectors in India and South Asia markets.
Speaking on the high profile addition to the management team, Dr Akash S Rajpal, MD and CEO, Ekohealth Management Consultants said, “We are confident that Steve Doswell’s rich experience will ensure that Ekohealth successfully progresses to next level.” “Steve being a senior industry leader in North America was invited to review our social impact projects at NASA. He was quite impressed with Ekohealth’s positioning, road map results to date and indicated an interest to work with me in making Ekohealth a central player in Indian healthcare. He has amazing past success stories with startups raising millions of dollars leading to IPOs. His interest in Ekohealth, his excitement with the model and his belief that I was in right place at right time was a great boost to my confidence. Steve has a great feel for the state of Indian healthcare from his time opening up South Asia, including India for the PharmaTrust remote dispensing systems. I am exceptionally pleased that he has come on board. I am sure his presence will boost the company’s leadership and enable us to take the vision of affordable health and ethical healthcare facilitation forward to commercial success,” he further added.
Dr Akash Rajpal recently won the prestigious Ramanujan Bose Social Impact Award for 2012 held by NASA Singularity USA for his Ekohealth initiative.
Giving his views on the Indian healthcare market and his vision for Ekohealth’s expansion plans, Doswell expressed a strong affinity for India as a country and a keen desire to be a part of the progression of healthcare in the country, “India has excellent private health facilities and physicians. However, the established systems of referrals and pricing of medical procedures hinders economic efficiency. Additionally, patients in India seem to be considerably less willing to consider alternative treatments, seek second opinions from physicians, compare prices of procedures and substitute generic for brand drugs than patients in North America, Europe and other regions of Asia. All of these factors represent artificial barriers to economic efficiencies in matching supply to demand and realising the benefits of competitive forces. As a result, patients in India are clearly paying a higher cost of healthcare then they would under a more open economic environment. I think that it is fabulous that Ekohealth is working to provide its members with the tools and information to precisely tear down these barriers and to empower patients to make decisions which will reduce healthcare costs without negatively impacting quality. I absolutely believe that this is a great model for India and I see no reason why virtually every Indian citizen who desires to use private healthcare services, whether having health insurance or not, would not be a member of Ekohealth.”
EH News Bureau
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