Healthcare Entrepreneurship and Management: A Comprehensive Guide for Biomedical Engineers and Entrepreneurs

Post pandemic, the world is not the same place. There has been an increasing focus on healthcare and well-being, which has created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for healthcare innovations and startups. From adoption of a range of medical apps and telemedicine technologies to heightened public interest in smart wearables and medical devices, the demand for efficient healthcare delivery has been skyrocketing.

This book aims to serve as a first-of-its-kind guide for skill development in conception to commercialisation of healthcare products and services. It covers the gamut from the study of healthcare challenges, such as understanding customer requirements, market needs, and competition, to the various steps of the healthcare product development process, such as defining value propositions and specifications, the creation of minimum viable product (MVP) to prototyping, and manufacturing. The authors also discuss key commercialisation and management strategies, including the development of a robust business plan, fund raising, intellectual property, creating barriers to entry, and launching healthcare startups. Medical product pricing, positioning, sales and distribution, and customer acquisition are also presented with real-life examples.

This book serves as a key reference not only for biomedical engineers who are looking to launch their products or services in the market but also for budding entrepreneurs willing to explore opportunities in the healthcare domain. For example, engineers and managers working on the development of medical devices require knowledge of ethical guidelines, regulations, and approvals to effectively launch their products in the medtech industry. On the other hand, entrepreneurs looking to benefit from the booming healthcare industry will find this book helpful in understanding the fundamentals of medical product development and commercialisation to launch their ideas successfully.

Dr. Arnab Chanda is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Biomedical Engineering, IIT Delhi, and a joint faculty at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, AIIMS, Delhi. He is also the founder of a start-up company BIOFIT Technologies LLC, USA. He earned his PhD from the University of Alabama, USA and has also been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Dr. Chanda is an expert in the fabrication and mechanical characterization of tissue mimics, and has previously developed artificial surrogates for human skin, muscles, brain, artery, and plantar fascia, and tested them at both lab and clinical settings. These experimental models have been used extensively for surgical training and has led to development of several healthcare products and start-ups. To date, he has received young researcher awards from ASME and MHRD and AO Spine International-Singapore. He holds and has filed 7 US Patents and 4 Indian Patents, authored 3 Books and over 95 articles in reputed international journals. Dr. Chanda is in the list of top 2% scientists worldwide as per Scopus Elsevier 2023 database. He also teaches two successful Executive Programs: “New Product Development and Management” and “Healthcare Entrepreneurship and Management” to engineers, doctors, and management professionals. Dr. Chanda is serving as the editor for ‘Biomedical Materials for Multi-functional Applications’, a book series published by Springer Nature, editorial board member for Nature Scientific Reports, and guest editor for several journals such as Engineering Research Express, IOP Publishing.

Shubham Gupta is a Ph.D. scholar and Prime Minister Research Fellow (PMRF) in the Disease and Injury Mechanics Lab (DIML), IIT Delhi, headed by Dr. Arnab Chanda. He completed his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune in 2019. His research is focused on the study of traction performance of worn footwear. He was instrumental in the development of a state-of-the-art portable footwear traction characterization device and has also experimented with a range of worn footwear to estimate their traction reduction and determine replacement thresholds. Shubham has also developed a pioneering computational fluid dynamics-based (CFD) model to study the underlying physics behind the traction properties presented by a new or worn footwear on slippery fluid contaminated floorings. His research interests are computational analysis of footwears, slip testing, finite element modeling, healthcare product development, and integration of robotics and AI/ML in medical applications. Shubham has been a teaching assistant for the executive program “Healthcare Entrepreneurship and Management”. To date, he has filed 2 Patents, developed 3 products, 1 Medical App, published 30+ articles in reputed international journals and 5 book chapters, and presented his research in 7 top international conferences in India, South Korea, and Japan.