Most Reasonable Cost and Portable Hands-free Emergency Ventilators

The globe is now becoming one and the covid restrictions are showing signs of being lifted albeit in a phased manner, but an underlying fact still emerges hospitals around the world are still struggling to cope with the upsurge in cases, as a number of factors are to be considered in a country like India where hospitals are stressing to find the right hospital product suppliers to supply them with the best medical equipment to fight this scourge.

The hospitals are looking for specific products that can help them fight the pandemic and one piece of equipment that is in high demand these days are emergency ventilators, as hospitals are filled with patients suffering from bad breathing issues, and these patients need ventilator support and at times due to lack of enough beds, they need portable ventilators that be used to treat the patient at emergency Covid centers that are not hospitals.

To meet this demand many medical equipment companies in India have changed the way they are operating to start manufacturing ventilators in the country. Earlier it would cost around Rs 10-20 lakhs to buy an imported ventilator, making the device a dream for small Hospitals. Keeping the price factor in mind several players in the medical device industry in India have jumped into the fray of manufacturing reasonably priced and portable ventilators that could be used in ambulances, or homes so that people requiring support could get it wherever they were.

The medical device industry in India stepped into the picture in April this year when they realized that there was a huge demand for Portable Emergency Ventilators and several small and medium players who were earlier not in the manufacture of these high-end devices stepped in to meet the growing demand for them.

They had a huge challenge facing them, they were to meet the same quality requirements as that of the imported equipment but were required to manufacture the same at probably one third the cost. We should remember that hospital product suppliers in India before the Covid outbreak were manufacturing around 6000 ventilators a year and their aim was to ramp up this production to 60,000 ventilators a month by the end of May.

Was this target realistic, to ensure that we got there the government asked the public sector companies and auto manufacturers to step in and help and a number of companies did just that? Maruti Suzuki partnered with AgVa Healthcare, a Delhi-based manufacturer of ventilators to help manufacture these machines. Ravi Pandit, Co-Founder and Chairman of KPIT, and his team of engineers set out to develop a low-cost hands-free ventilator that could be used anywhere.

The Medical equipment companies in India earlier were dependent on imported parts to manufacture ventilators, but as the demand for ventilators grew, they realized that it was time that they innovated and looked for parts that were manufactured at home so that they could bring down the costs of the finished product. With the help of Top Engineering colleges Like IIT Mumbai and the participation of auto majors, this task was simplified by the government’s active support has lent a helping hand to ensure that the hospital product suppliers in India were able to meet the demand of the Medicare industry of ventilators to fight the scourge of the deadly virus at the lowest possible cost.

The fight against Covid is not yet over and experts are predicting a second surge in the number of cases but with the ramp-up in domestic production of PPE kits and ventilators, India is better placed to fight the pandemic.