India’s emergency healthcare system faces a critical and growing challenge.
Despite advances in other areas of healthcare, emergency medicine remains underdeveloped. Shortages of trained professionals, inadequate infrastructure, poor road conditions, congested traffic, and low public awareness of emergency protocols all contribute to delayed treatment and preventable deaths.
Pre-hospital care, in particular, is often neglected, with “casualty” wards in hospitals staffed by residents with limited training in emergency protocols. Triage, a cornerstone of effective emergency medicine, is frequently overlooked. This stands in stark contrast to developed countries such as the UK, Japan, and Germany, where air ambulances, robotics, and advanced systems work seamlessly with highly trained personnel to ensure rapid, quality emergency care.
To address this gap, the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT) incorporated India’s emergency care challenges into its 45th Global Leaders Programme (GLP). Held in January 2016 in Hong Kong and Cochin, Kerala, the programme brought together 23 participants from ten countries and companies. Working in partnership with MUrgency Global Service, a start-up cloud platform and mobile app connecting people in need of medical assistance with trained responders, participants developed business recommendations to support MUrgency’s launch in India. Their collective work aimed to strengthen MUrgency’s business model and lay the groundwork for its global expansion.
This report presents the outcome of the GLP’s work and examines India’s emergency healthcare gap in detail. It highlights the opportunities and challenges in expanding emergency and non-emergency care and showcases MUrgency’s mobile-based model as a scalable, technology-driven solution. By focusing on real-world conditions and systemic gaps, the report provides a practical roadmap for how innovative, market-based approaches can improve healthcare outcomes at scale.
At the heart of this report is MUrgency’s three-part service model:
- MUrgency Emergency aggregates existing emergency responder resources, including doctors, nurses, paramedics, EMTs, CPR-trained individuals, and medically certified volunteers, to deliver rapid, verified, on-demand emergency response and ambulance services.
- MUrgency Community provides free healthcare information through a portal maintained by MUrgency, empowering individuals with knowledge to respond effectively in emergencies.
- MUrgency Connect offers access to a wide range of non-emergency healthcare services, including home medical services, appointment scheduling, and an online pharmacy.
By integrating these services, MUrgency not only closes the gap in emergency response but also strengthens preventive and non-emergency healthcare delivery. Its model leverages India’s rapidly growing smartphone market to ensure that emergency and urgent care are available to anyone, anywhere, with a single tap on a mobile phone.