India’s healthcare industry has experienced a significant boost, albeit at the hands of the Pandemic. The Pandemic has propelled the MedTech landscape into an accelerated growth drive. Medical technology innovation can make modern care accessible, available, and affordable to all by lowering the cost of the product or delivery. India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF) predicts that Indian MedTech will stand at $50 billion by 2025[1]. The government of India is also supporting Indian MedTech, allowing the sector to grow exponentially as evident in the current financial budget speech of Feb 2023
In our effort to share more about a career in MedTech, we interviewed Dr. Richa Singh, a former healthcare service provider who has worked in GE Healthcare, and Roche, and is currently leading the Enterprise Partnerships & Strategic alliances at Jio Healthhub. She has 14+ years of work experience across Health services, Public health consulting, MedTech, and Pharma domains.
1. Please tell us a bit about yourself. What motivated you to pursue a career in healthcare? How did you begin your career after graduating from Maharashtra University of Health Sciences (MUHS)?
Growing up as an army kid, I was influenced by my hardworking parents and my uncle who was a Radiologist. Moreover, I was always curious to know how the human body works- why certain bodily movements and functions are in our control while others are not. Much like other medical aspirants, I also gave a couple of national medical entrance exams and was finally selected to attend the 5-year undergrad program in Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) at the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences (MUHS)
Once you are in medical school, the curriculum for students is quite vast, including lectures, practical labs, pre-clinics, etc. Thereafter in-clinic duties begin wherein one must manage patient records, calls, appointments, and long working hours that could sometimes stretch up to 18 hrs a day. Nevertheless, it helps you ease into the medical space as a professional at an early stage.
However, it was only after I started my internship that I realised, medicine is not just about knowing the human body and securing good grades, but also one ought to face several practical situations such as administrative hurdles, navigating changing protocols, other systemic challenges related to poor healthcare infrastructure, and lack of capacity building, in India. This made me want to go beyond just being an individual contributor as a doctor to working in community health where I would get a chance to work on these larger societal challenges.
2. After graduation, you moved to a role in marketing and sales. This is an unconventional route for a healthcare professional. What led you to make this move?
While entering the healthcare profession, I wanted to take the traditional path of opening my own clinic or working in a well-established hospital. But when I started my internship in my last year at medical school, I got an insight into what life might look like after graduation. At that time, I was more interested in working in community dentistry & public health where I got the opportunity to work with government institutions, non-profits, domain experts, etc in the healthcare industry.
During our college fest, one of the sponsors was looking for a marketing executive for their startup. After, I graduated I took that marketing role as a part-time job and worked at a clinic on weekends to keep in touch with dentistry as well. I was preparing for post-graduation management exams. As a marketing executive, I prepared various marketing and communication materials for clients, learned various software programs for designing, and gained experience with dealing with clients. Working in a startup meant that I had to work in many areas which were out of my comfort zone. This practical experience taught me how industries generate revenue at the ground level. This exposure for a year unexpectedly led me to turn a part-time engagement into a full-time role.
Being part of a startup ecosystem earlier in my career helped me learn things that I find useful even to this day. This path was not entirely a planned one but it certainly opened doors to greater things in my life.
3. You have a diploma in financial management and have also done a few courses in design thinking, data, and AI. How have these helped you as a MedTech professional?
Over time I realised that being part of a marketing and sales team, one needs to have some basic understanding of accounting, reading financial statements, basic marketing principles, etc to do the job more effectively. My management coursework had some parts which were more logic driven and easier to understand, while others were a bit more technical such as cash flow statements, ratios, cost accounting, etc which took time for me to fully grasp. Hence, apart from my day job, I made an effort to dedicate some time to studying these subjects to upskill myself. To my surprise, in my finance PGDM class, I scored the highest marks with a distinction!
Design thinking course, I recently pursued in a hybrid model which was led by a well-known Stanford graduate business school faculty, Prof. Stefanos, and is part of their entrepreneurship curriculum. It is helping me immensely in my current work on understanding customer needs, user personas, business models, etc
I believe that our learning can never stop and one must constantly look to acquire new skills in and outside of work to remain at top of one’s game. Hence I undertook short courses in data analysis, dashboarding, and AI.
4. How different was it working for a financial institution like CRISIL (S&P Global) from working at Roche Pharma or GE Healthcare? How did you make that transition?
Crisil, S&P Global is one of the biggest credit rating agencies in the world, and it was my first big corporate job. I was a bit overwhelmed on my first day at work, as we had a waist-high stack of official papers to sign which were concerned with company security, compliance, and privacy, hence it was a big change for me coming from a startup ecosystem. But once I got the hang of things, it made me realise why corporate giants and financial powerhouses need these checks and balances which make them reliable financial institutions that do fair trade with their employees and clients.
My transition from a financial institution to a healthcare institution has been supported by various transferable skills from my former education and work experience. For instance, if we compare this situation to a healthcare organisation, as a healthcare provider or institution, if the organisation cannot protect the patient’s confidential data and records then it won’t be a trustworthy place where people would come to avail services.
When I joined GE Healthcare in 2019-20 the COVID pandemic had just begun, and this led to a huge demand for medical devices such as ventilators, patient monitors, life-saving equipment, etc. I was happy to contribute my bit by leading India’s first CT-in-the-box project which is the only one in the country and was inaugurated by the Government of Maharashtra along with the leadership from GE and our three CSR donor-partners -L&T, PNB housing finance, SNC Lavalin. I combined my public health, MedTech, and social sector skill set to bring this project to fruition.
5. What led you to social entrepreneurship and CSR? What has your experience been like in these fields? Also, tell us about your role as a mentor/advisor for different foundations and startups.
My former social venture or non-profit organisation, Citizens Association for Child Rights (CACR), has been working for social impact in women's health, menstrual hygiene, skilling, and digital education in several government schools.
UNICEF was one of our project donors that later became a long-term sponsor and mentor-partner for CACR. I and the team learned a lot under the guidance of the UNICEF INDIA WASH team (water supply, sanitation, and hygiene) with experts like Yusuf, Anand, and Bharathy.
CACR has taught me to work at scale in resource-constrained environments. It also gave me an opportunity to work with very diverse cohorts of people and equipped me with the ability to design and scale interventions with public, private, and academic consortiums. Some of these projects have even been covered by national news media. For example, our project on menstrual hygiene with municipal schools of Mumbai sponsored by UNICEF had been covered by the Times of India.,publication.[2]
Coming to the second part of the question, currently, I am part of a few startup incubators as a growth advisor. Healthcare startups approach me with their business strategies and plans seeking assistance in market development, analysing customer and market response, helping them with pitch decks, expanding their consumer base, etc. As an advisor, there are basically three major criteria that I focus on for startup advice, first is the idea itself, whether it’s something unique that people will pay for and find valuable, secondly if the business strategy is user-centric (B2C) or enterprise-centric (B2B) along with the market timing and dynamics, and lastly the expertise, passion, and commitment of the founding team.
6. What led you to Digital Health? At Jio Healthhub, what does your day-to-day work life look like?
I ventured into Digital health to develop and experience working on a user-centric system of care which bought me to Jio Healthhub, a healthcare platform or companion for every individual and his/her family. By creating a profile on Jio Healthcare one can track one's family or own health status. Along with tracking, this platform via PHRs (personal digital health records) and wearable integration, provides multiple articles on health, mental well-being, and lifestyle management. It also has a self-assessment feature for COVID, diabetes, cardiovascular complications, etc, a symptom checker for high/medium/low risk, and lastly one can avail services such as doctor consults, lab tests, and tracking medicine intake, among others.
Each day, I divide my responsibility into 3 areas. The first vertical is related to providing digital product solutions and market access for enterprises such as pharma, device companies, or public health entities that intend to do large-scale projects in women's health, diabetes, immunization, etc to connect them digitally with their audience. The second vertical is where we partner with healthcare startups or mid-size companies in terms of products/services that can complement both parties. Lastly, being a part of the Jio Healthhub team, I also work internally with other RIL entities on various common events/large-scale projects consisting of multiple work streams such as digital health, e-pharmacy, emotional wellbeing, etc.
7. What advice would you give to students and young professionals who are looking to pursue a career in Medical Technology? What are the new avenues open to them?
My advice to medical students and young professionals who are keen to pursue their career in the Medtech industry would be to upskill themselves with relevant coursework or a management degree as it gives them an opportunity to segway into different healthcare sub-domains such as hospital administration, pharmaceutical industry, healthcare IT, etc. It widens your horizon and exposes you to different aspects of healthcare which you would not have encountered at medical school.
Another way would be to get into an internship program in your preferred industry. Internships give me an opportunity to learn practical work as well as network with future mentors, clients, and colleagues.
Apart from that, students and professionals could also refer to several career websites and read articles and interviews to understand how things work in different domains of healthcare.
The key is the focus should be on ‘learning first and earnings later' at the beginning of your career. Pick jobs and managers who support you to enable this and that will take you far in your career. Seek opportunities outside your comfort zone to acquire diverse expertise which will help you become a sought-after resource and make future career transitions easier. Best wishes!
[1] https://www.ibef.org/blogs/medtech-sector-in-india
[2]https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/other/girl-talk-lessons-in-hygiene/articleshow/60066863.cms