🫁 Oxygen Learning Series — Meet Ganesh and Robert from Philips

On October 6 we are hosting the second of our Oxygen Learning Series events. These events are an opportunity for our oxygen innovators and advocates to showcase and discuss their work and for others to learn from their insights and experiences.

On Thursday we are very excited to welcome Ganesh Iyer and Robert Murdoch from Philips who will be sharing their work to create an ‘oxygen-as-a-service’ model in India.

Oxygen on tap

Ganesh and his team have been working to identify the challenges, needs and aspirations of those primary health centres and nursing homes in India that suffered the most during the pandemic due to the unavailability of oxygen.

“We have been trying to understand what their pains are and to create solutions that will take away those pains while reducing the cost-of-care to the most severely ill patients,” Ganesh explains. “What we realised through the course of the project is that there is a huge dependence on oxygen cylinders, so the idea is to make these centres less dependent on cylinders and look at oxygen-as-a-service similar to other utilities like electricity and water where at the flick of a switch you are able to get oxygen.”

In order to do this the team is working on validating a concept where oxygen is produced on site, stored in a reservoir and then made available at the bedside through silicon pipes.

Oxygen-as-a-utility

Up until now, this kind of model has been difficult to implement due to the lack of reliable, low-cost, point-of-use oxygen compressors, along with the absence of a sustainable business model around a ‘buy oxygen, not equipment’ process. It’s these two existing paradigms that this project is looking to disrupt.

“If you need electricity you don’t build an electric plant in your building,” Murdoch points out. “Somebody else builds an electric plant and you hook into their supply, so that when you turn on the switch, you have electricity.“ Similarly, in this model a central industry maintains and owns the equipment while those who use the oxygen only pay for the oxygen, receiving a bill at the end of the month just as they would for any other utility.

As Ganesh explains it, this oxygen-as-a-utility approach should also eradicate much of the waste and logistical burden that makes the existing model so unwieldy. “Depending on the size of the facility, they might get five, ten… maybe even 30 cylinders every week. And then the cylinders that were dropped off the week before also have to be picked up, and they may or may not be completely empty.”

It’s this ‘oxygen milk run’ that the team want to replace. “We want to show that we can create a viable, reliable point-of-use generation and storage system that avoids all these cylinder deliveries,” Ganesh says. “It’s really a sea change in the way that oxygen is being delivered.”

Find out more

If you are someone advocating for or experimenting with how to make oxygen provision a sustainable and impactful utility in low resource settings, then this event will be invaluable for you.

Ganesh and Robert will be talking in detail about their literature review on supply chains, their interviews with over 150 clinicians in India, how they modelled their Oxygen-as-a-Service business, and their plans for implementing and scaling the concept.

🗓 Register for the event here

🫁 Read the Oxygen as a Utility report (pdf), produced by PATH along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Philips Healthcare.

👉 Read more about Philips mission to improve the lives of 2.5 billion people a year by 2030, including 400 million people in underserved communities