Dr. Nitin Chouthai works in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Detroit Medical Center and is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Wayne State University, but it wasn't until he visited neonatal intensive care unit in India and saw how much of a gap there is between care for newborns in the first and third worlds.
"I realized the situation (in India) was terrible," Dr. Chouthai says. "There were 50 babies laying there with one ventilator and no blood-pressure monitors. Lots of babies were going to die because their parents couldn't afford critical care."
Dr. Chouthai founded
PALAV four years ago to help change that. The nonprofit is focused on sending pediatric equipment from U.S. hospitals, such as ventilators, to hospitals in India. The organization and its team of 20 people (all volunteers) work to provide this equipment and the training to use it for free to help lower infant mortality.
PALAV is about to launch an Indiegogo campaign to raise money to help acquire more of this equipment, ship it overseas and educate medical professionals how to use it. The hope is the education and equipment will help end the epidemic of infant mortality in both urban and rural parts of India through simple economics.
"I want to lower the cost of intensive care and make it easy for anyone in the hospital to operate," Dr. Chouthai says.
Source: Dr. Nitin Chouthai, co-director & CEO of PALAV
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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