PVRI
Advanced Eye Care for All India
The Challenge
- Loss of eye sight has a tremendously negative economic and social impact on low-income families, often reducing or eliminating the ability of at least one family member to earn an income, further stretching already thin familial resources.
- The prevalence of blindness is partly a symptom of pervasive lack of access to health care, particularly preventative care, as such blindness is a major public health issue in India.
The Innovation
- Acumen Fund's $2,000,000 investment in PVRI, through Pushpagiri Health Care Hospitals Pvt. Ltd., will enable the business to build two additional hospitals, thus expanding its reach to approximately 50% of Andhra Pradesh, India's fifth most populous state with 75 million people.
- By expanding its flagship hospital in Secunderabad into three hospitals, PVRI will be able to provide specialized eye care for a much larger cross section of the population, with a special focus on treating diabetic blindness, childhood blindness, and corneal blindness.
The Impact
- With this expansion, PVRI, which has previously been able to treat more than 25,000 patients, will now aim to provide treatment to nearly a million people suffering from various forms of preventable eye disease.
- PVRI hopes to treat 450,000 patients through surgeries and similar procedures, to screen over a million patients, and, through mobile eye camps, to screen an additional 450,000 patients.
