The ongoing pandemic has exposed the challenges due to scarcity of technology-enabled healthcare solutions that are accurate yet low cost, accessible, user-friendly and amenable to massive manufacturing scale-up and parallelization. The availability of easy-to-use and reasonably sensitive detection methods for community level testing, in such backdrop, for example, holds the potential of capturing the commonly missed cases of early infection and asymptomatic disease presentation and reduce the opportunity for community-level transmission.
. Such compelling needs, along with other prevailing public health challenges, have paved a clear way forward of the technology wing of the CRTDH towards advancing further on novel diagnostic technologies that essentially offer an amalgamated approach with a trade-off between the scientific standards of high-end laboratory based tests with the elegance of common rapid tests. This paradigm appears to be the future of diagnostics, targeting specific public health measures towards catering the underserved, with no distinction between consumers having expected variabilities in economic barrier, and in the process 'democratize' disease diagnostics by bringing high-end lab tests to the ambit of the bottom of the community pyramid in the green field with no differential treatment of the rich and the poor. Further, by engaging women power as frontline health workers in a sustainable ecosystem and bringing them in the ambit of rural employment generation, the CRTDH has shown a specific approach of establishing gender equality in the underserved community by promoting healthy and economically-supportive livelihood for all.
In addition, the empowerment of micro-small-and medium scale enterprises towards participating in manufacturing the most technologically advanced yet deceptively simple medical products have opened up a new paradigm of employment generation under difficult circumstances.
