REPORT ON VISIT BY MR.P.SRIDHAR AND PRATIYUSH
Ever since we were kids with a wide array of dreams, one thing was made quite clear to us -the world of science is divided into two distinct fields engineering and medical. They are as different as can be with no meeting ground. Yet there are those who defy such dull and meagre distinctions to leave their mark. Today, on the 5th of July, 2020 we, the XI STD students of MAHSS were visited by one such man-Mr. P. Sridhar.
Mr. P. Sridhar is the founder and CEO of Ubiqare Health based in Bangalore. He has held noble leadership positions in various organizations at various levels of management for the last 33 years. He has 20+ years of experience in senior executive roles .He is associated with quite a few NGOs including the Indian Cancer Society. His activities include helping volunteers to provide support to hospitals and other organizations. Prior to finding Ubiqare Health, he was the managing director of MaxLinear Pvt.Ltd. and helped set up its operations in India. Even though he is associated with the medical field, this has not always been the case as he got his Masters degree in Control and Instrumentation from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
After Mr. P. Sridhar was warmly welcomed by Sir Vyankatesh Prabhudesai, the director of MAHSS, Mr. P. Sridhar talked to us at length about what motivated him to start up in the medical field and what his company aims to achieve. He felt that despite progress made in IT and tele-health over decades, a large number of families, whose near and dear ones go through debilitating illnesses, undergo a lot of trauma and face a lot of challenges in getting clinical attention and management of episodes at home. To help families overcome such problems he founded Ubiqare Health which offers specialised medical healthcare to patients inside their homes via a combination of expertise in healthcare, embedded computing, and cloud platforms. When he started up, he decided to focus on extending the specialists care to patients at home. This involves combining tele-presence, trust, teamwork (collaboration) and human touch at the last mile. His company has achieved a lot in a short period of time in a field which has not yet been established firmly .He now aims to attract more specialists and patients, and addressing other serious illnesses. He also spoke about how the pandemic has been a positive change for his business as people and specialists are now more attracted to his style of business in which hospitals-which are not only overly costly but also full of other diseased people creating a negative and discouraging environment-are not an important factor.
The students then asked their queries to Mr. P. Sridhar who answered them gracefully. He talked about how IITs have interdisciplinary courses which do not restrict the field and interests of a person and are highly flexible. He talked about how concepts like remote surgery are presently science fiction but may one day in the far future become a reality. He also informed us about haptics, a field which extensively studies touch and also researches how to implement it remotely.
In the last ten minutes we were visited by another guest, Pratyush Sridhar, the son of Mr. P. Sridhar and an ex-student of Aryaan Study Circle. He talked about his experience at Aryaans and told us that a good student is remembered for his humility, and not his intellect. After completing his engineering, he worked for a few years and did his MBA from IMT Ghaziabad and now works for Becton Dickinson. He briefly discussed his job which is medicine based and said how his engineering experience helped him at his job. He also inspired us to never give up and do our best. He also mentioned that releasing the vaccine for COVID-19 too early may not be feasible and could have unpredictable and dangerous side effects. The session ended with a mention of how prestigious institutes like IIT Kharagpur are introducing engineering-medical degrees.
I would like to end by saying that on this day of Guru Purnima, it felt apt to be visited by a student as humble and respectful as Pratyush Sridhar and Mr. P. Sridhar who inspired the entrepreneur in all of us.
-Aariz Shaikh, XI, MAHSS