1. What was the idea behind creating MyHealthcare?
India ranks 150 among 195 countries in terms of quality and accessibility of healthcare. The second challenge we face is lack of meaningful patient information, which leads to diagnosis errors or increases the timeline for accurate diagnosis.
MyHealthcare provides an effective digital healthcare ecosystem, which enhances the access of healthcare delivery, with a vision to provide quality healthcare for all.
MyHealthcare is a digital healthcare ecosystem that works with hospitals, its doctors, caregivers and enhances the patient care continuum processes. The core focus of MyHealthcare is to bridge the healthcare delivery gap using a data driven care process. As a service offering MyHealthcare is designed to assist hospitals and clinics in building out their patient engagement and scaling their digital healthcare roadmap.
MyHealthcare has partnered with leading hospitals and healthcare institutions in building a meaningful and effective healthcare ecosystem, mapping best practices in clinical treatment and integrating into the various technology platforms of a hospital to help deliver a 360-degree care to its patients from anywhere and at all times.
2 What kind of services does the platform offer that makes it different from its competitors?
MyHealthcare is a digital specialty healthcare ecosystem that offers an integrated care delivery platform, bringing hospitals, healthcare service providers, doctors and patients into an unified ecosystem. The platform brings together the hospital, its doctors, nurses, allied services, health records, pharmacy and home care services to offer one tap care to patients.
For patients, MyHealthcare helps in building a complete patient longitudinal history, whereby all medical records, clinical history of a patient is created and managed centrally. To manage a patient from diagnosis to cure, MyHealthcare maps the patient journey from booking an appointment, the consult with the doctor physically or virtually, delivering the e-prescription, delivering services such as diagnostics or pharmacy or homecare services, follow up consults or referrals, all delivered within the ecosystem. Patients are empowered to manage their healthcare needs through a seamless Personal Health Record (PHR) platform, health trackers through our integrations with wearables, smart watches and IoT devices.
For doctors and care providers, the ecosystem enhances their efficiency with our Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which has been designed and developed by clinicians. The use of augmented intelligence and AI based voice to text functionalities, contribute in delivering a faster and more accurate diagnosis to cure platform. Administrative functions are reduced through automation and data driven frameworks such as clinical decision support systems, polypharmacy & drug reaction alerts help improve the quality of diagnosis.
Remote patient monitoring integrated with the EMR helps in creating a care continuum ecosystem. We are on a path to create a complete remote patient monitoring platform through device integrations, where real-time data from the clinical devices are delivered to the patient and the clinical team on the EMR. Today we can track vitals such as temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, pulse rate, blood oxygenation (SPO2) and blood sugar in real-time, with vital alerts that trigger an alarm at the clinical command centre to help timely intervention.
Our belief is that ecosystems of care will be the drivers of healthcare delivery and better patient outcomes.
3 How has the Healthcare industry responded to the change?
Digitisation and penetration of mobile internet have been game changers for the Indian healthcare industry. Digital health solutions have helped enhance access to healthcare services for patients especially since the advent of Covid 19 . The significant benefit has been the opportunity for healthcare ecosystems to serve all health needs for a customer, be it consult, pharmacy delivery, diagnostics at home, home healthcare and remote patient monitoring.
Start-ups like ours have been the drivers of this digital healthcare evolution. In recent years tech giants such as Google, Apple, Samsung and others are pushing a whole new gamut of digital health applications for monitoring heart rates, ECG, blood oxygenation, blood pressure, pulse rate and blood sugar levels.
Going forward, the digitisation of health records will help immensely in the accuracy of diagnosis, building patient longitudinal history, reduce medical administration errors and offer timely warnings, alerts to prevent severe medical crises.
4. Do you think that it helped patients in Pandemic during lockdowns?
With mobility being a severe constraint, MyHealthcare is focussing on bringing virtual consults, diagnostics at home, home care, home isolation management and pharmacy at home into a common care ecosystem. The patient and their families have access to doctors from India’s leading hospitals and are able to manage all their care needs from the MyHealthcare app.
With the current surge in COVID-19 cases, MyHealthcare patients can monitor their vitals at home using the MyHealthcare app, which has built-in trackers for alerts if a patient’s vitals are outside the permissible range. All home care / home isolation patients are managed from a single command centre by the hospital. If the patient at home is under distress or not feeling well, with the trigger of a patient alert, the command centre team is able to reach out to the patient over video call and help manage the care needs. As the number of patients to be managed increases, technology is the only solution as we have already reached the maximum capacity of nurses and doctors available. Sending care providers to all homes is also not a scalable solution.
The MyHealthcare ecosystem also helps manage all patient records and build a centralised patient history. When a patient seeks a doctor consultation, the patient’s longitudinal history helps in faster and more accurate diagnosis.
Doctors, nurses and care providers work in the same ecosystem. The doctors can use the MyHealthcare mobile or web platform for the virtual consultations. A state of the art electronic medical record (EMR) platform helps doctors analyse the diagnosis and generate prescriptions including medicine and test orders, etc. To improve the efficiency, the EMR has built-in automation and augmented intelligence which maps diagnosis, treatment protocols and also our voice.ai (voice dictation based order entry). With the load on doctors increasing by the day, our team is working on the continuous improvement of the EMR.
Safety and convenience are two major factors driving virtual consultations. Patients can consult their doctors with an experience as close to a physical consult experience. For doctors too they are able to avoid multiple physical contacts and limit the in-clinic consultations for those who have been reviewed under virtual consulat and need a physical assessment. From a convenience perspective, the time saved on a virtual consult versus physical is enormous.
We feel the greater benefit to patients going forward will be the ecosystem effect – after the doctor consults, they can use the mobile app to place diagnostics, pharmacy or homecare orders, pay online and get services started or delivered. In addition, having a centralised, patient longitudinal history helps build a complete clinical profile of a patient and also helps in better clinical diagnosis and patient care outcomes.
5. Did the Covid-19 Pandemic accelerate the growth of the platform?
We witnessed a significant increase in demand for virtual consultations, homecare / home isolation services during the second wave, compared to the peak last year, that too under national lockdowns when OPDs, etc were shut. Doctors had been doing virtual consults till midnight, 7 days a week, to keep up with the patient load. It is incredible how they managed to stay afloat during these times.
While the second wave has subsided, there is the looming threat of a third wave, and we expect online consultations to increase further.
2020 has been a tough year for everyone globally but for us it has helped understand patients and their healthcare needs much better. It has also helped us push technological innovations for better diagnosis and treatment.
6. Looking at the trend and markets, Do you think the shift towards telemedicine is here to stay?
2020 was a defining time for the healthcare sector, much like what demonetisation did for the fintech industry in 2016. The importance of technology, more specifically the use of digital technology in the healthcare sector was brought to the fore. With lockdowns enforced, OPDs and hospital services closed – use of digital solutions such as virtual consults, telemedicine services became game changers across the healthcare sector. While both patients and doctors struggled at the beginning, both have now learned and adopted the channel as one of the primary channels of care delivery. Hospitals and doctors have hesitated using telemedicine for a multitude of reasons, jumped into it and built services around it as well.
India’s telemedicine market is expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2025, spurred by a rise in teleconsultations, telepathology, teleradiology and e-pharmacy due to the pandemic, this has resulted in significant growth in the number of telemedicine platforms in India, start-ups such as MyHealthcare. Headquartered in Gurugram, MyHealthcare is a future-ready digital healthcare ecosystem that works towards an integrated patient care continuum platform. MyHealthcare is a system that is built around the needs and requirements of patients, doctors, caregivers and allows them to engage seamlessly, taking advantage of the latest technology offerings, including AI solutions.
7. Do you have any partnerships with healthcare products & services providers? If so, which ones?
The MyHealthcare ecosystem is driven by partnerships, while we drive the technology backbone, our healthcare partners include the Max Hospitals group, the Fortis group, BLK Super Speciality, PSRI Super Speciality, Aakash Healthcare, Breach Candy Hospital, Nanavati Hospital, Primus Super Speciality, Woodlands Multispeciality, Vimhans Nayati Super Speciality, Neotia Healthcare group and many others.
Our diagnostics partners include Healthians and Dr Lal Path Labs. Our pharmacy partners include PharmEasy and 1mg.
For patient monitoring we have partnered with Omron (blood pressure and pulse rate), AliveCor KardiaMobile (ECG and heart rate)and Blood Sugar monitoring devices from Accu-Chek and more are on the way.
8. What are your future plans?
We have raised USD 4.5 million in Series A – July 2019, led by Sixth Sense Ventures (India’s leading consumer centric fund), with participation from Hunch Ventures and IDSMED and will be closing our Series B round of funding soon.
With the launch of the remote homecare monitoring of patients, we will be looking at extending this to Post IPD care. We want to try and create a home system to reduce a patient’s time at the hospital. We are also introducing AI based EMR, enabling doctors to do an accurate diagnosis based on the longitudinal history of a patient in its entirety, the updated version of which will come out soon.
We hope to become synonymous with digital healthcare ecosystems in India and in the coming 5 years, we want to be available in the majority of the Tier 2 & 3 cities. We also wish to expand to other geographies such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Middle East
Source: techstory.in
