At APAC, Health-Tech is one of the fastest growing verticals: Navdeep Manaktala

The pandemic has accelerated the digitization of health-tech startups. What’s your take on this?

We see a special demand for better and easier access to health care in these times, and in fact, health-tech is one of the fastest growing verticals across the Asia-Pacific. In March 2020, the government announced telemedicine guidelines during the nationwide lockdown, and state-owned teleconsultation portal e-Sanjeevani is setting a record high. Regulatory interventions provided an additional impetus to healthcare digitization, and major health-tech startups reported a three- to five-fold increase in patient traffic within just six months of the start of the pandemic.

Telemedicine, e-pharmacy, and e-diagnostic solutions for sample collection at home were the areas leading the way. The COVID-led lockdown forced patients to rely on digitization of healthcare, and realized the convenience it provided. Growth is also turning into consolidation and entry of major players in this space, and you see it in acquisition deals, such as Tata Digital’s decision to buy 1mg, Pharmacy’s acquisition of Medlife, and Reliance Retail Ventures’ acquisition of Netmeds.

With the adoption of the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), there will be a further increase in digitization among healthcare technology providers, including health-tech startups. Today, patient data is stored in the silos of health care stakeholders such as hospitals and clinical laboratories. NDHM Healthcare provides a fabric for data interoperability, allowing patients to store, access and share standardized digital health records with all stakeholders and receive seamless care and faster insurance claim settlement.

This will pave the way for patient-consent-based open digital infrastructure startups to build patient-centric innovations on top of NDHM, such as personalized suggestions for chronic care management or building machine learning models using anonymous patient data. Our digital healthcare partner, CareXpert, manages over one million electronic patient records for 25 healthcare providers across India through its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, and they already have AWS It runs on a cloud-native NDHM-ready stack. Startups mitigate the impact of the second wave of COVID-19 on India’s healthcare infrastructure with innovative solutions for diagnostics, patient care and immunization drives.

Preventive care gained importance due to rising health care costs. How can startups build on AWS to offer solutions?

According to the World Health Organisation, India’s healthcare spending from an individual’s personal savings accounts for around 62% versus 18% globally. The high cost of health care and a change in mindset towards staying fit and closely monitoring health is an impetus for preventive health care. Startups are using innovative business models to take advantage of this change in mindset. Online fitness classes are emerging as a big use case due to the pandemic.

Startups leverage AWS here for content delivery, where fitness videos and other content are stored at AWS Edge locations across India and delivered to consumers securely and at high speed.

For example, Cult.Fit’s live classes increased by 30 times the normal amount within a week of the pandemic-induced lockdown. Within three weeks, the app was remodeled on AWS to support 300,000 concurrent users in a single class, using AWS Media Services and Amazon CloudFront.

Cult.fit also uses machine learning models trained on Amazon EC2 P3 instances to help track user movements during exercise, demonstrate how accurately users are exercising, and calculate how much energy they are burning.

Can technologies such as remote patient monitoring and telemedicine help address issues related to inadequate healthcare infrastructure in remote areas?

Startups are driven to solve problems that were never solved before and to address challenging structural gaps in day-to-day life. They do this by applying technology to create new reach and new business models, and they are not constrained by traditional practices. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) uses sensors to remotely monitor a patient’s life and sound an alarm in case of any deterioration.

We helped Indian startups use RPMs to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and asthma, set up pill reminders, book appointments, and use a personalized mobile app to show progress, with connected devices to capture data. and to generate an alarm. During Covid, RPM became all the more useful due to the acute shortage of staff and the risk of infection from personal contact with COVID-19 patients. AWS customer Dozee provides remote patient monitoring equipment to over 230 hospitals, bridging the nurse shortage in India.

Using Doozy’s contactless sensors, hospitals can upgrade normal beds to step-down intensive care units (ICUs) in less than 5 minutes and enable remote and central monitoring of patients in wards. Dozee streams data from more than 5,000 devices into the Amazon Aurora database making vital monitoring devices like heart rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure. This data is monitored for adverse events by a customized machine learning model running on AWS. Doozy estimates it has saved more than 75,000 nursing hours so far.

For example, Cloud Physician is redefining critical care in India with the application of cloud technology to optimize clinical operations in highly demanding, cost-effective ICU settings. They provide a one-stop critical care solution that caters to resource-constrained ICUs across India, where there is a shortage of intensive care practitioners or ICU specialists. So far, CloudPhysicians’ intensively-led clinical teams have treated more than 25,000 critically ill patients in 14 states. Government and private sector hospitals choosing CloudPhysicians as their preferred partner for treating over 4,000 COVID-19 patients represent a potentially game-changing change in the tele-ICU approach. Cloud physician-enabled ICUs manage life and death situations with both pre-emptive and prescriptive support for health care teams. This is made possible by CloudPhysician’s proprietary ICU management solution, Radar, which allows physicians to manage hundreds of patients round the clock. Radar leverages the highly reliable and scalable Amazon Web Services and connects experts seamlessly. It institutionalizes everyday life-saving protocols from Leh to the Cachar Valley in Assam and from Gujarat to Tamil Nadu.