Four B’lore Healthcare Institutions Ace Medical Value Travel Awards

Four Bengaluru-based healthcare institutions aced the Medical Value Travel Awards 2017 by emerging winners in as many as 5 of the 14 categories. The Awards were announced on the first day of Advantage Healthcare India 2017, the third global summit on medical value travel (medical tourism) jointly organized by FICCI; Dept. of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Govt. of India; and Service Export Promotion Council (SEPC).

The Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences yet again proved its medical excellence by bagging two awards for Interventional Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, respectively, in the category of “Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Cardiology.”

The Mazumdar Shaw Medical Center emerged the winner in the category of “Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Oncology,” while Nova IVI Fertility aced the category of “Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – In Vitro Fertilization / Infertility.”

The Ayurvedagram Heritage Wellness Centre was declared the Wellness Center of the Year.

                

The Medical Value Travel Awards were presented by Rajnish Kumar, Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax (Karnataka); Sudhanshu Pandey, Jt. Secretary, Dept. of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, GoI; Sangeeta Godbole, Director General, Services Export Promotion Council (SEPC); and Sangeeta Saxena, Additional Economic Advisor, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, GoI.

LIST OF WINNERS

1.       CATEGORY: Medical Facilitator of the Year: HBG Medical Assistance (Gurgaon / Delhi)

2.       CATEGORY: Wellness Centre of the Year: Ayurvedagram Heritage Wellness Centre, (Bengaluru)

3.       CATEGORY: Ayurveda Centre of the Year: AyurVAID Hospitals (Kochi)

4.       CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Cardiology (Interventional Cardiology): Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences (Bengaluru)

5.       CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Cardiology (Cardiac surgery): Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences (Bengaluru)

6.       CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Paediatric Cardiac Sciences: Fortis Hospital (Mohali)

7.       CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Oncology: Mazumdar Shaw Medical Center (Bengaluru)

8.       CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Neurosciences: Paras Hospitals (Gurgaon)

9.       CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – In Vitro Fertilization / Infertility: Nova IVI Fertility (Bengaluru)

10.   CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Transplant (Liver): Gleneagles Global Hospitals (Chennai)

11.   CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Transplant (Kidney): Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals (New Delhi)

12.   CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Transplant (Heart): Fortis Malar Hospital (Chennai)

13.   CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Transplant (Bone Marrow): Apollo Hospitals (Chennai)

14.   CATEGORY: Medical Value Travel Specialist Hospital – Spine Surgery: Apollo Health City (Hyderabad)

Accenture Appoints Nikki Mendonça as President of Intelligent Marketing Operations

Accenture has appointed Nikki Mendonça as President of Intelligent Marketing Operations within Accenture Operations. Mendonça’s appointment is effective early 2018.

In this new role, Mendonça will manage a global team focused on helping Accenture clients activate, operate and scale marketing programs to deliver increased performance and growth. The team will use predictive analytics to target and attract the right customers across marketing channels to enhance loyalty and optimize the customer lifecycle.

The Intelligent Marketing Operations team will collaborate with professionals from across Accenture, including Accenture Interactive, to create a marketing growth engine for clients through the seamless integration of capabilities delivered as a managed service. Accenture helps clients define the user experience, design and optimize the channel mix, and run the campaigns as a service while leveraging unrivalled data insights, leading artificial intelligence capabilities, and deep industry expertise.

Mendonça brings to Accenture 25 years of strategic marketing experience, including mastery in creating highly contextual and personalized customer journeys and expertise in driving digital content optimization. She joins Accenture from OMD Worldwide, an Omnicom company, where she served as president of the company’s EMEA region. In that role, she had overall responsibility for more than 6,500 marketing professionals serving leading global brands, including McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Estee Lauder, Liberty Global and Walt Disney. Previously, she held management roles at Capital Radio and Leo Burnett.

“Nikki is a proven business leader and digital marketing strategist and I’m excited that she will lead and help us to build our Intelligent Marketing Operations business,” said Debbie Polishook, group chief executive, Accenture Operations. “Her arrival comes at a strategically important time in building this capability as we continue to develop innovative solutions that combine platform, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other core technologies to help clients enhance their marketing impact.” 

Mendonça said, “My passion is helping clients create highly personalized and engaging customer journeys that improve their marketing performance and grow their business. I am very excited to join Accenture, a global leader in digital marketing services, and look forward to leading a talented team whose mission is to help clients transform their marketing performance to achieve new growth and success in a digital-first world.” 

Philips HealthWorks Empowers Niramai, Parentlane, Theranosis and Touchkin Start-ups to Transform Healthcare Across India

Philips HealthWorks presented their first Bangalore start-up at the Breakthrough Day in the Philips Innovation Campus. The 4 healthcare start-ups were chosen from an array of 600 start-ups. They showcased their solutions to the audience consisting of healthcare professionals, Philips leaders, leading entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

The 4 start-ups of the Bangalore cohort are: Niramai, Parentlane, Theranosis and Touchkin.  The solutions presented include non-invasive breast screening solution, an intelligent social platform that tracks a child's holistic developmental activities, a solution for monitoring Cancer treatment efficacy & clinical outcomes and an emotionally intelligent AI platform.

Philips HealthWorks program is a unique and intensive 12 week tailored program designed to help the start-ups build, test, de-risk and scale their idea. Apart from mentoring, the program also provides technical and business expertise, state-of-the-art technology, co-working space and advice from the top experts within the industry.

Speaking on the momentous occasion, Alberto Prado, Head of Philips HealthWorks said, “Tackling the biggest challenges in healthcare requires dynamic partnerships. Our world-class startup program gives startups unrivaled opportunities to make a profound difference to the lives of billions of people. The program gives access to an outstanding network of experts, investors and healthcare partners and also to our three global innovation hubs.  We are very excited about our first Bangalore cohort which is showcasing exciting solutions across a vast array of fields in Healthcare, from Data Science, Oncology, Behavioral health to Parenting.”

“Philips HealthWorks startup program is unique. It is customized according to the need of each start-up. We are making a dedicated effort to help start-ups in strengthening their value proposition and become successful sustainable business. We are committed towards building a supportive environment for start-ups across the world.” said Srinivas Prasad, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus, Bangalore.

Talking about their journey and experience with Philips HealthWorks, Dr. Shibi Kannan, Founder & CEO, Theranosis said, “There is something special about Philips HealthWorks program. Most of the Startup programs are focused on IT sector, very few of them on Healthcare sector and within that very few are focusing on technology – Philips HealthWorks addresses it via attention to both the business side and technology side of Healthcare solutions.”  Neeraj, Co-founder & CTO of Parentlane said, “Philips HealthWorks program helped us understand the big picture, identify our customers, and understand their pain-points. I especially liked the experimental designs which was an effective way to get the responses from the customers.” 

Powered by Philips 125 years of groundbreaking innovation, Philips HealthWorks believes that supporting invention and entrepreneurism among emerging companies is critical in furthering the cause of accessible and affordable healthcare for all in India. 

Cisco’s Digitization will Improve Efficiency, Reduce Costs, and Expand Capacity of Akshaya Patra Midday Meals to Over 28500 Children

As part of its global efforts to support nonprofit organizations around the world that help meet critical human needs, Cisco today announced an agreement with Akshaya Patra Foundation which will be accelerating digitization of their kitchens across 7 locations in India.  Akshaya Patra Foundation is the world’s largest (non-profit) mid-day meal programme serving wholesome food to over 1.66 million children from 13,958 schools across 12 states in India. Digitization of Akshaya Patra kitchens and key offices will help them realize significant gains in productivity, scalability, and cost-efficiency and accelerate Akshaya Patra’s goal to reach 5 Million children by 2020.

As part of this agreement, Cisco will deploy an enterprise-grade network and collaboration suite connecting their kitchens and their offices by enabling end to end IT & process digitization.  The upgraded Akshaya Patra network will connect their offices in Bangalore, Gurgaon, and field kitchens across 7 locations (2 kitchens in Bangalore, one each in Lucknow, Vrindavan, Bellary, Guwahati, and Jigani) on a single network which will enable them to efficiently track their kitchen production, distribution, supply chain and logistics. 

Through digitization, Akshaya Patra will have faster and better connectivity in their field offices which is critical to the kitchen’s operational performance, and necessary to support virtual collaboration and knowledge sharing.  In addition, Akshaya Patra can now analyze, and operationalize disparate sets of data in near real-time helping them to improve the overall speed, security and responsiveness of the programme.  This digitization effort is expected to increase Akshaya Patra’s operational efficiency by about 5% in the initial phase, which will help them extend the mid-day meal program to over 28500 students everyday immediately. 

Cisco has been associated with Akshaya Patra since 2007 through employee giving, volunteering and disaster relief assistance. In the aftermath of the 2015 Chennai floods, Cisco sponsored Akshaya Patra’s first kitchen-on-wheels. The kitchen-on-wheels can run around the clock, with un-interrupted power supply to provide 2000 meals every two hours when stationed at any site post a disaster. In the aftermath of the recent floods in Gorakhpur, this kitchen generated about 100,000 meals.

“Technology connects people in meaningful ways and has the power to create new opportunities and boost economic growth and well-being. Cisco is committed to supporting scalable and self-sustaining programs that use technology to address some of society's biggest challenges. For the past 20 years, we have applied our technology and expertise to accelerate global problem solving and positively affect people, society, and the planet.” - Tae Yoo, Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Cisco.

                                                   

“We are excited to work with Cisco to digitize our operations. Small improvements in operational efficiency can have a big impact when you distribute at scale.  Currently most of the data collection and planning is manual; with a rapidly growing network of kitchens, the network platform we are putting in place today will help us in our digitization journey by enabling real-time data collection, streamline kitchen production, distribution and supply chain.  All of this will help us in our mission to reach more children.”  -  Shridhar Venkat, Chief Executive Officer, The Akshaya Patra Foundation.

“In India, we focus on positively affecting and engaging with the communities in which we work, live, and play. Using the power of the network to digitally enable nonprofit organizations such as Akshaya Patra is a great example of how technology can help solve the world's most challenging problems. We are committed to focusing on solutions that can be scaled to benefit millions in underserved communities around the world.”  - VC Gopalratnam, SVP-IT and CIO-International, Cisco.

Blue Star Chooses PTC's Thingworx IoT Platform for Industry 4.0 and Advanced Analytics

PTC has announced that Blue Star Limited, India’s leading air conditioning and commercial refrigeration company has selected the ThingWorx IoT Platform from PTC to monitor its factory operations to improve operational efficiency and factory quality.

Blue Star Limited fulfils the cooling requirements of a large number of corporate, commercial as well as residential customers. The Company also offers expertise in allied contracting activities such as electrical, plumbing, fire-fighting and industrial projects, in order to offer turnkey solutions, apart from execution of specialised industrial projects. The Company's mainstay of product development and R&D has been energy efficiency, coupled with eco-friendly and sustainable products.

Blue Star Limited was looking at improving its operational efficiency across its five modern manufacturing facilities in India. After an exhaustive due diligence process, during which various software vendors were evaluated, Blue Star Limited selected ThingWorx IoT Platform for its rapid application enablement, connectivity, machine learning capabilities, augmented reality, and integration with leading device cloud offerings.

Speaking on the partnership with PTC, Suresh Iyer, Chief Information Officer, Blue Star Limited said, “We look forward to a long lasting partnership with PTC through implementation of PTC’s ThingWorx IoT platform. We believe it will accelerate our transformation journey and improve operational efficiency of our factories in the country.” Iyer added, “With an objective to develop and produce products that meet the highest standards that Blue Star Limited is known for amongst customers in India, through PTC’s ThingWorx’s capabilities in IoT, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, we strongly believe that we will be able to meet the highest quality standards in the industry, while also increasing our productivity with reduced product failures and unplanned downtimes, thus reducing our OPEX significantly. We intend to be one of the pioneers in operating smart connected factories in India.”

Kalyan Sridhar, Country Manager, PTC India said, “Blue Star Limited is constantly enhancing and transforming all its factories across India with latest technologies that improve various aspects of a manufacturing unit. With Blue Star Limited being powered by PTC’s ThingWorx IoT Platform, we believe that the company will be able to utilize the latest Industry 4.0 technologies and significantly improve their productivity, innovation, operational efficiency.” Sridhar added, “The major benefit that ThingWorx provides is reduced time to deploy, CAPEX and OPEX. We believe that, by leveraging ThingWorx, Blue Star Limited can deliver more robust solutions & serve their customers with preventive maintenance solutions.”

ThingWorx was purpose-built from the ground up for the Internet of Things. It contains the most complete set of integrated IoT-specific development tools and capabilities available, offering the industry’s deepest functional capabilities.  ThingWorx makes it easy to develop and deliver powerful Enterprise IoT solutions that deliver transformative business value.

·  ThingWorx platform will leverage Industry 4.0 technologies - Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies to reduce product failures

·  Reduce downtime caused by unplanned events by sending breaking news alerts of the errors to the proper parties and predict the amount of time until a system fails

·  Improve the quality of products by providing a full digital reporting of products produced

·  Reduce delays in decision making by enabling team members with real-time detailed data and creating dynamic visualizations of the status of production systems

·  Identify trouble spots within the facility by observing real-time data on the factory floor with augmented reality (AR), providing a bird’s eye view

Indus Vox Media and Mpower Launch Series of Podcasts on World Mental Health Day

On account of World Mental Health Day, Indus Vox Media together with Mpower launched a series of podcasts called ‘Place of Mind’ which are tales inspired by everyday experiences of people with mental concerns.

Mental health is a topic that is more often than not, shrouded in stigma and misconception. This causes the topic to be relegated to the periphery of our collective awareness. Through weekly podcasts, ‘Place of Mind’ takes listeners on a journey through the minds of people around us. By sharing lived experiences of people, ‘Place of Mind’ will illustrate how all our lives are connected, how we influence each other, and how every single-story matters. Each week, ‘Place of Mind’ will explore the journey of someone coping with a mental health concern. 

The brainchild of Neerja Birla and Ananya Birla, Mpower endeavours to be the movement to affect change and proactively champion mental health causes, create awareness, advocate prevention and provide services with a professional, holistic and multi-disciplinary approach.

Through the ‘Place of Mind’ series, people will get a unique opportunity to listen and really understand some of the issues that individuals are battling with every single day of their lives. How many of us are actually aware of these people and their experiences? We aren’t sure if the person sitting next to us at work needs help or just needs someone to listen. The need to sensitize the public to these issues and alleviate stigma associated with them is stronger, now more than ever. 

Speaking on the launch of ‘Place of Mind’, Neerja Birla, Chairperson and Co-founder, Mpower, said, “This World Mental Health Day we want everyone to empathize with those who struggle with mental issues. Sometimes, we aren’t even aware of the issues that people around us are going through. With this podcast, we are bringing to life, lived experiences of real people to sensitize everyone about mental health issues. I urge each one of you to play an active role in championing the mental health movement.”

Speaking on the partnership with Mpower, Amit Doshi, Founder, IVM Podcasts, said, “We are very excited about partnering with Mpower on "Place of Mind". We believe podcasts are a great way to discuss difficult issues like Mental Health. Using storytelling as the mechanism for passing on this kind of information is an innovative use of the medium and we are thrilled to work on this new concept.”

The Mpower movement strives to stamp out the stigma associated with mental health concerns. Every single day, people come to Mpower to find a safe space, to share their stories, and to find help. Along the way, Mpower hears the experiences of people managing their mental health issues. We see how these concerns impact the individual as well as the people around them, and how these ordinary men, women, and children learn to cope with mental health issues with our help.

Escort’s New Products Displayed at IREE 2017 for Safer Rail Travel

Living up to its role of a leading partner to the Indian Railways, Escorts has developed a series of new products to make rail travel safe and faster. The new products include anti lift AARH Couplers, Axle Mounted Disc Brakes, Brake Disc for high speed LHB coaches, Locomotive Brake Electronics for both Electric and Diesel Locomotives, High end Dampers for Locomotives and LHB coaches besides Air Springs. This will be aligned to modernization of infrastructure, focus on safety and enhancing the experience of traveling by train.

The new products were showcased during the two-day International Railway Equipment Exhibition (IREE) 2017, which opened at the Pragati Maidan in the National Capital today. The portfolio displayed is the outcome of its multi-dimensional product strategy with a mix of in-house R&D and Global Technology collaborations.

Escorts recently achieved the coveted International Railway Industry Standards (IRIS) certification for Design Development & Manufacturing. It aims to contribute to the Make In India program through massive import substitution by offering frugal and value engineering products with its deep inhouse R&D. The company further intends to infuse capital to build the latest cutting-edge products through partnerships with leading Global Railway Component majors.

Dipankar Ghosh, CEO, Escorts Railway Equipment Division (RED), said, with the government focus on safer railway operations and the huge investments planned, a big paradigm shift for the technology is on the anvil.  We see a huge potential in the modernization drive of the Railways in country for Railway Component manufacturers like us. Our endeavor to make the best in India and offer India’s best to the world has also helped us identify potential markets in South-East Asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and some African countries.”

Escorts Railway Equipment Division (RED), a division of the Escorts Group, is the supplier of new products like Locomotive Brake Electronics, Loco Dampers Axle Mounted Disc Brakes, Brake Disc and LHB Dampers, besides critical railway products like brake systems, couplers, suspension systems and Rubber and Friction Products in the past. Since 1962, the company has been a reliable partner of Indian Railways throughout its journey of modernization. Escorts has a presence in almost all the rolling stock segments of Passenger Coach, Locomotive, Wagons, EMUs and Metro. Escorts Railway Products are certified to ISO 9001:2008 and its products conform to Indian standards such as RDSO as well as international standards such as UIC and AAR, besides having achieved the IRIS certification.

The Escorts Group is among India's leading engineering conglomerates, operating in the high-growth sectors of Agri Machinery, Material Handling, Construction Equipment and Railway Equipment. The Group has earned the trust of over 5 million customers by way of product and process innovations over seven decades of its existence. Escorts endeavours to transform lives in rural and urban India by leading the revolution in agricultural mechanization, modernization of railway technology and transformation of Indian construction.