MIT Sloan recently published an interview on its blog with Jessica Lu ’17, who discussed her experience participating in an India Lab action learning project with the Jodhpur School of Public Health and MIT alumni-founded mobile health technology company ClickMedix.
The article references statistics from the National Institutes of Health, which reported that 62 million people have Type 2 diabetes and that number is “growing rapidly.” According to Lu, Type 2 diabetes has “high potential to be an epidemic [in India]. We found that health care in India is very much symptoms-based, and people mostly do not take any preventive care measures for various non-communicable diseases such as diabetes.” Lu adds, “Focusing on preventive care could lessen this burden on both the system and the patients.”
Lu, along with a team of three Sloan MBAs (all ’17) partnered to “model the potential financial and patient benefits that would result from diabetes screening and early intervention.” Lu’s team treated 20,000 patients in the state of Rajasthan, where they spoke with “patients and nurses in rural villages, community health care workers and doctors, senior private practice and hospital doctors, and government officials at the district, state, and national levels.”
Lu believes her team’s evaluation “will enable Jodhpur School of Public Health to benchmark its success and give the team on the ground an understanding of the results they generate.”