Standardised, affordable 'drop-in' ICU facilities for India's small towns

CIPACA a health start-up in the south, claims to have saved about 106,000 lives over five years with its ICU services

While most developed nations have more than 10 ICU beds per 100,000 people, India has only 2.5 such beds, about 80 per cent of which are in Metropolitan cities. This, when about 70 per cent of the Indian population lives in rural areas. It was while treating a patient that the magnitude of this gap between urban and rural became evident to pulmonologist Dr Raja Amarnath, prompting him to quit the large hospital chain he was attached to, and start an enterprise called CIPACA to make tertiary-level standardised ICU services accessible and affordable to rural India.

Today, the start-up has