'Our Aim Is To Build A Digital Healthcare Stack To Empower Doctors' Sandeep Gudibanda, CEO & Co-Founder of Healthplix Technologies
What is the story behind the inception of HealthPlix? How was the journey of building the venture?
What if doctors could use technology they already know and love, to record and comprehend diagnosis in a way that they understood? What if we could streamline patient medical history and be able to analyse it easily. This is what we set out to do, chugging full steam ahead towards building an Artificial Intelligence powered EMR that could decipher and simplify doctor's practice.
HealthPlix was founded in 2016 with an aim to bring technology to the heart of healthcare. The biggest challenge faced by doctors was the inability to remember patient history and medical records. Our primary goal was to drive better health outcomes at population level. We empower doctors with digital tools that take their practice online, improve patient outcomes, and save time. We strongly believe that the current crop of health problems can be better managed by providing digital tools to assist doctors at the time of performing treatments. We are currently going through exciting next phase of growth where we have brought in leadership that has deep expertise in scaling up our product offerings.
HealthPlix EMR helps simplify doctor workflow, write reports faster and improve efficiency. Eventually we want our doctors to spend as much time as possible with patients and less time on accounting or notes, paperwork etc.
Tell us about your offerings and customer base? How has been the response so far?
Our AI-powered EMR focuses on the needs of Indian doctors. The Printed Rx and the ability to give a Rx in regional language adds another delight factor for the patients. The EMR learns from the usage patterns of the doctors, with an effective use of personalisation machine learning models and we learn from every keystroke that the doctor makes. This helps in identifying patterns and modules that are most effective. When we first launched our EMR platform, our focus was to help doctors with time-based efficiency, which saw a lot of traction.
Currently, 15 million plus patients across India have been treated through HealthPlix EMR platform by doctors practicing across 16 specialties. Our doctor base and geographic spread across 370+ cities in India makes us the largest EMR software used by doctors to digitize the "care" in Indian healthcare.
With the introduction of ROBIN the ultimate AI Assistant to a Doctor, we are elevating the approach and change the way doctors carry out in-clinic activity.
How HealthPlix is helping doctors to work faster and smarter?
Our EMR helps in improving the quality of patient care. Doctors can use the platform to look at a patient’s medical history and then prescribe treatment. This saves a lot of time for doctors who are treating hundreds of patients. Not only that, but our platform also helps doctors with patient insights that help them in taking better informed decision.
HealthPlix EMR software has a knowledge base which help doctors determine all the factors needed to assess as they treat patients. For instance, if a patient with diabetes also complaints of swollen feet and frequent washroom visits, the doctor can quickly assess that the patient’s symptoms are getting worse. He can then quickly check for the functioning of kidney and other organs. At this point, the EMR also indicates the doctor to monitor blood sugar of the patient.
As a doctor, you can see how a patient’s disease is progressing, what medicine was prescribed to the patient earlier and if they are working. This will help the doctor to not prescribe medicines for the patient that didn’t work earlier.
Doctors have immense knowledge, but they have very little time. Our intention is to help them make better decisions within the few minutes they have with a patient. These few minutes matter most. It is during this few minute of precious interaction when all the importance decisions are made, such as treatment plan, diagnostic tests, drugs and dosage, surgical procedures, and hospital referrals. This interaction is what drives the $88 billion of annual healthcare spend.
To give you an example of the use case, recently a doctor on HealthPlix succeeded in catering to over 15000 covid patients from all parts of Maharashtra with a recovery rate of 95-98%. With the adoption of Healthplix EMR and its robust software capabilities, his clinic was able to treat more than 800 patients a day at peak.
Pour some light on recent developments in HealthPlix? What is the thought behind this development and what are your expectations with this launch?
We recently registered feedback from our doctors that they required a place to view all the information that they enter HealthPlix EMR in the form of easy-to-read summaries. Hence, we worked on this closely with the doctors to build a Doctor Insights Dashboard with a variety of parameters and customizable filter options to give doctors the flexibility that no other EMR does.
For us Doctors are like Superheroes say Batman’ Hence our AI assistant to doctors is named as ROBIN.
Our new product – ROBIN is an in-clinic analytics dashboard for our doctors. With this new product release, we want to support the doctor community with information on what is happening in their clinic over time. The dashboard helps doctors with visibility of some key metrics concerning patients and their practice over time including demographics and trends in their patient population. Through the metrics provided by ROBIN, doctors can understand the demographics of their patients, the rate of increase in patient footfall, increase in chronic patients and further help the patients with the right and effective treatment.
How is HealthPlix driving product innovation in the healthcare sector with its products?
We are passionate about serving the doctor community by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. What sets us apart from others is our doctor-first approach. We have continuously invested heavily in tools and technologies that will make doctors practice, more efficient, scalable, and reliable.
We are witnessing a spike in doctors making data-backed decisions through the HealthPlix Platform. We are first in the market to release an in-clinic doctor dashboard that will help doctors in using data and analytics to make informed decisions. It is one of its kind insights dashboards developed to help doctors analyse the factors, trends, and correlations in medical practice. Robin’s Doctor Insight Dashboard will help healthcare professionals fulfil their mission of providing compassionate, accessible, and high-quality care.
HealthPlix products and solutions are designed to solve the fundamental problems faced by an Indian doctor, especially in a war-time situation like COVID-19. Health tech start-ups like HealthPlix will drive the consumerism of healthcare with higher patient engagement. Such digital platforms boost the quality and safety of care.
How will the new developments empower the doctor community and drive the healthcare ecosystem in India?
India is moving towards a digitally enabled healthcare eco-system where tools like EMR will become inevitable. When used effectively, EMRs immensely improve patient care. EMR is the central component of the health IT infrastructure maintaining a person's official, digital health record and is shared among multiple healthcare providers and agencies. Doctors are catering to hundreds of patients every month which means tons of critical information about patients and their practice are being entered into EMR on a day-to-day basis. Our primary objective is to provide doctors visibility on important metrics associated with their clinic and practice. We give power in hands of the doctor by supporting them with better decision making and ensuring that a doctor can deep dive to the most granular level in the dashboard to pull data together for all patients and modes of treatment. The Doctor Insights Dashboard feature release from ROBIN is a doctor-facing UI designed to easily track the critical aspects of their patient visits with predefined algorithms and quick links to visual charts. It acts as an ultimate assistant to doctors and plays a pivotal role in elevating and revolutionizing healthcare delivery
In the age of artificial intelligence, there is a lot of buzz around data analysis. Patient information can be used to bring predictability and actionable insights to a variety of sectors, including healthcare. Healthcare is one of the industries where precision in decision-making and certainty in action is of paramount importance. Our extensive patient records and valuable insights available on the platform will help doctors to treat patients more efficiently and drive an evidence-based healthcare eco-system.
What is your take on the Indian healthcare sector? How AI-driven products can change the outlook of the industry?
With the onset of COVID-19, digitizing the country’s healthcare ecosystem will prove to be the foundation required for an integrated health system in the next decade.
According to a BCG survey done during COVID-19 in 2020, 85% of clinicians used teleconsultation and digital platforms during the lockdown, 50% of doctors found digital platforms to be an effective tool for patient interactions, 80% tele-consultation services were from first-time users and 44% tele-consultations were from non-metro cities. Furthermore, the launch of Ayushman Bharat Health Mission will transform our healthcare system by giving doctors accessibility to patient health records for better treatment and diagnosis. This will be a shared digital infrastructure that can be leveraged by both public and private enterprises to build and provide new, innovative, healthcare solutions.
The approach to the creation of a comprehensive healthcare repository allows unique start-ups like HealthPlix to contribute and build on the mission to create electronic medical records (EMR) for every citizen in the country. Digital HealthID is the digital spine of India's health infrastructure and we believe that access to affordable healthcare and doctor discovery for the common man will be done at ease. Emerging economies like India are in dire need of digitization of healthcare services and the launch of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission is a welcome move.
Further, artificial intelligence has played a critical role in various industries for decades. We are now witnessing increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the Indian healthcare setting. Research has shown that deep learning algorithms provide insights to clinicians in predicting prognosis and future events in patients. Also, advanced digital technologies like AI and ML can help in prevention as well as early detection of diseases by capturing and analysing various vitals of patients. This can even bring live saving treatments to the market faster. AI has the potential to become the ultimate assistant for doctors.
What are your funding and expansion plans?
We have received funding from leading investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, JSW Ventures, Kalaari Capital and Chiratae Ventures, to name a few. In their latest round of funding, HealthPlix raised $13.5 million as part of Series B funding, which was led by Lightspeed Ventures and joined by existing investors.
Post COVID, demand and adoption of digital tools has seen a huge spike and we are scaling up teams to meet this demand. We will also be enhancing our capabilities to cater to specific specialties and new product lines by hiring across functions like marketing, analytics, product, and design to meet the requirement.
What is the road ahead for HealthPlix? What other projects are on the way?
HealthPlix is currently the largest EMR player in the Indian market with the widest coverage across geographies and specialities. Our aim is to keep this momentum going and aspire to grow 8x in the next two years by expanding our team and adding more product depth. Since India is our priority market, our aim is to build a digital healthcare stack that will power the end-to-end clinic and patient management for the doctors.
We have developed an agile system that empowers doctors with tools such as e-prescribing, e-consultation, regional Rx among a host of other features. But Indian healthcare facilities are not equipped and agile enough to empower doctors. Health systems need to introduce more robust technology that would assist in providing faster diagnosis while treating patients at the point of care.
The new doctor insight dashboard covers insights related to patients and basic clinic operations. In the next release, we aim to provide doctors with their prescription level analytics. The use of this dashboard goes beyond in-clinic decisions, it can be used for research purposes and for real-world evidence for any kind of scientific study. The first release of ROBIN is a steppingstone to build intelligence into the HealthPlix EMR that helps doctors delve into the information that is collected with their practice over time. The scope of ROBIN is expansive and will see many updates in the future aimed at empowering doctors to drive better patient outcomes.
