Changemakers: Karin Munasinghe

Delivering healthcare solutions to people living at the bottom of the pyramid means many different things to Karin Munasinghe MBA1998.

As SVP of Marketing for Asia Pacific with medical device multinational Fresenius Medical Care, there’s the professional challenge of delivering affordable dialysis machines to a new market segment.

Understanding this segment means getting to grips with the unmet needs and lack of means affecting 500,000 patients who have no access to dialysis in China and a million more in India alone. It also means navigating complex ethical and business dimensions to ensure that the development and distribution of life-saving yet low-cost solutions come with a guarantee of quality and performance, and reach people in real need who do not have the same resources as other segments of society in other parts of the world.

This is a new initiative launched in recent months by her company and Munasinghe acknowledges the complexity: “It’s a new segment for me and there’s a lot to understand in terms of patient needs and business models. Going into the bottom-of-the-pyramid markets is interesting. As traditionally underserved groups of people start to build access to healthcare, we’re going to see a rapid increase in demand. This in turn is leading to new challenges in terms of cost and quality. There’s a lot to balance commercially and ethically when you’re striving for equality of healthcare.”