Team Siliconindia

• IIMA and Novo Nordisk India sign 5-year MoU to tackle obesity and NCDs through joint research, policy advocacy, and health system strengthening.
• Focus areas include obesity clinics, healthcare provider training, and public health policy development, with pilot outreach and telemedicine studies.
• IIMA Endowment Fund played a key role in enabling the collaboration aimed at scalable healthcare solutions and long-term policy impact.

Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) and healthcare firm Novo Nordisk India Pvt Ltd (NNIPL) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on 8th July, 2025, for the initiation of a five-year strategic collaboration. The partnership will be aimed at enhancing India's healthcare system with a specific focus placed on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), specifically obesity.

According to the deal, the two organizations will jointly develop programs in three primary domains capacity building in health systems, policy advocacy, and health economics. The partnership will include the establishment of model frameworks for obesity clinics, development of educational materials for healthcare providers and stakeholders, and development of evidence-based public health policies.

Also, the effort will cover research studies that examine the economic burden of obesity to personal health, labor productivity, and the overall healthcare system and economy.

The collaboration identifies projects for collaborative research work, such as joint publication of papers with the government agencies, launching pilot outreach programs, and assessing the performance of telemedicine in the control of NCDs among the remote populations. These projects are designed to create actionable evidence to inform both policy-level intervention and healthcare delivery improvements.

The institute, in its communique, stated that the IIMA Endowment Fund (IIMAEF), which enables collaborations and philanthropic involvement, was instrumental in forging this partnership. The fund promotes activities that complement the institute's mission of leveraging academic and research skills to find solutions to social issues, among them public health.

Through the collaboration of education, business, and research assets, the alliance will make contributions to scalable healthcare models in the management of NCDs, with a focus on obesity. The initiative is meant to foster long-term health outcome and policy improvement in India.