What We Do



We harness the power of innovation, technology and public-private partnerships to develop solutions that address the alarming primary healthcare problems around the world. India serves as the sandbox for testing and perfecting innovative primary healthcare delivery solutions for replication across India and other developing countries.


Reforming the Landscape of Primary Healthcare in India through Innovation, Technology and Digital Health Solutions.

WISH Foundation is committed to improving the reach of, and access to, quality primary healthcare services, particularly through the use of innovation and digital technology, since they have immense reach and potential.
Providing sustained access to quality healthcare especially for last mile populations in rural and tribal areas of India requires navigating several challenges. In the first place, rural areas do not have much access to privately provided healthcare. The private sector largely fills in the gaps in the healthcare system in urban areas, since doctors are usually unwilling to live in far flung rural areas. Secondly, the government’s public healthcare system of sub-centers (SHCs) and primary healthcare centers (PHCs), that are meant to cater to people living in far flung rural areas, have been under-performing for decades. Hence there has developed a lack of trust in the government’s ability to serve the remote populations. As a result, several chronic illnesses have escalated, plaguing the last-mile population.
The most fundamental of these issues is the serious lack of skilled and qualified staff and doctors to accurately assess and respond to the needs of the patients. Secondly, the infrastructural capacities in terms of proper maintenance of patient records, devices required for testing and assessment, and even stocks of medicines are poorly maintained or sometimes, non-existent. As a result, there is often little accountability within the system, which is important and necessary in all situations, but especially in the case of healthcare.
Furthermore, when patients are unable to receive the services required to resolve their medical issues at the SHCs or PHCs they are often referred to the community health center (CHC) for treatment. But these CHCs, as already alluded to above, are quite distant from the last-mile locations, and they serve a larger population from the surrounding villages. If a rural area’s PHC does not have the required service, the patients must go all the way to a community health centers – imagine the attrition rate when the patients do not have the time or resources to follow up on their services or go to the CHC. This leads to delay in treatment and increased health risks. Hence, the primary health centers play a critical role in the ecosystem of healthcare in India, and reforming the primary healthcare delivery system to provide comprehensive and quality health care is a key strategy in the efforts to provide sustainable healthcare to all citizens.
Innovation is at the core of the WISH Foundation’s strategy, and in order to tackle the challenge of reforming the last-mile health centers, WISH foundation has leveraged its expertise in digital solutions to transform the under-performing SHCs into Digital Health and Wellness Centers (dHWCs). In the dHWC model, primary health issues are resolved using innovative digital solutions. The local staff in a dHWC is responsible for the initial check-up and recording of the patient’s health indicators and symptoms. They also maintain digital case records of the patient. Then, the patient is able to receive specialized care from an expert via telemedicine – that is, using audio-visual equipment, and digital records that the doctor can access remotely, the patient can consult with a doctor, even one who is off location, and receive e-prescriptions. This is beneficial for the patient, who is able to receive expert care without additional expenditure on travel to a distant PHC or CHC, and it also addresses the problems of short staffing and accountability that the PHCs face.
The dHWCs model also overcomes the need for a pharmacist for dispensing medicine as the dHWCs are provided with Swasthya-ATMs - vending machines that dispense medicines, and these are managed by a digitized inventory management system. There are also Point of Care Devices, and a large range of diagnostics that can be performed at a digital Health and Wellness Center.
WISH Foundation piloted and demonstrated this model successfully in 2017 and has since scaled it to 100 dHWCs in multiple states, with plans to scale to 300 dHWCs.
In addition to dHWCs, WISH has upscaled and is managing over 700 primary healthcare centers that use a variety of digital health solutions, and has served over 22 million patient cases in the states of Assam, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. These solutions have proven to be innovative and effective, as evidenced by the many awards bestowed upon the foundation from the state governments for its work.
Apart from innovating healthcare services at the grassroots level, the WISH Foundation also provides Management, Monitoring, Advisory and Technical support to the aforementioned state governments. This is another core foundation strategy, since enabling state governments to effectively and efficiently provide healthcare services is the most constructive manner in which to ensure those services are sustained.
At the national level, WISH Foundation works through initiatives such as its National Innovation Unit (NIU) within the National Health Authority (NHA). NIU was established as the dedicated arm NHA to bring much-needed innovations to the health ecosystem with the objective of ensuring access to quality and affordable healthcare for all. In order to improve market access for need-based innovative solutions, NIU focused its effort through its flagship initiative – the Market Access Program (MAP), designed to help commercialize and scale up innovations to improve the healthcare delivery system. MAP has enabled a seamless path in the ecosystem that allows mainstreaming of innovations by facilitating institutional linkages, robust piloting and validation, public and private procurement, etc.
WISH Foundation offers continuous training services and online healthcare education, as well as data analytics and visualization services by building real time dashboards to enable decision making and provide strategic advisory services to state health missions. All of these endeavours are crucial to achieving WISH Foundation’s goal of ensuring access to quality primary healthcare to 100 million underserved people in India and other developing nations by 2027.
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Our program in India is:

  • Demonstrating the management of high-quality Primary Health Centers upgraded through innovation and technology.
  • Advising state governments on ways to make primary healthcare solutions scale-ready by leveraging our on-the-ground experience and learning .
  • Continually innovating solutions to address the challenging goal of universal primary healthcare coverage.
  • Scientifically documenting evidence to enable scale-up of our innovative models of primary healthcare delivery across India and other developing countries.
With our singular focus on finding primary healthcare solutions and with the experience and knowledge gained in the last six years, we find ourselves well-positioned as an international voice for primary healthcare transformation.

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