There are about 2,975 startups in India that focus on health-tech. Here are some of the leaders in this space which are climbing to become the pioneers in innovation helping to enhance patient safety, healthcare outcomes and quality of care:

Qure.ai: Qure.ai dvelops deep learning algorithms that interpret radiology images. The company repurposed its product to detect for Covid-19 and quantify the proportion of lungs affected due to lesions, generating reports in less than a minute. It also developed an app for frontline health care providers for contact monitoring and remote triaging of Covid-19 patients.

Mfine: Mfine is an AI-driven healthcare network offering online doctor consultations. The company has launched a Covid-19 self-assessment tool, along with the option of a video consultation service, which has been used by over 60,000 people. It also offers services for infected patients in home quarantine.

HealthPlix: HealthPlix provides clinical software for doctors. It has developed an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software, and provides Clinical Decision Support (CDS) to doctors and helps them generate e-prescriptions under 30 seconds.

Remedo: Remedo runs a telemedicine platform connecting over a lakh patients with doctors on its platform. The startup is expanding to other specialities like cardiovascular, neuro, and respirators. Remedo, connects doctors with patients, offering customised care plans, including consultation, follow-up visit reminders, tests, medicine reminders, and detailed answers to patient FAQs.

MyLab: MyLab is a biotechnology company that produces molecular diagnostic detection kits. It became the first Indian firm to receive commercial approval from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization to manufacture Covid-19 test kits.

MedGenome: MedGenome is a genomics and clincal-data driven diagnostics and drug discovery research company. It has partnered with Xcyton Diagnostocs to undertake the Covid-19 testing at its Bengaluru lab. It has also tied up with US-based SciGenom Research Foundation to analyse DNA sequences and variation data from over 300,000 individuals to predict susceptibility to coronavirus.

1mg: 1mg is an online healthcare provider offering e-pharmacy, online consultation and diagnostic services. It was among the first companies to introduce mobile Covid-19 testing vans. It has worked with enterprises to build a standard operating procedure to deal with employees testing positive for Covid-19 and has stepped up efforts to deliver medicines homes through its e-pharma unit. It faces stiff competition in the e-pharma space by many startups such as pharmeasy, medlife, netmeds etc. The e-pharmacy market in India is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 63% to reach US $3,657 million (~Rs.25,000 crore) by 2022.

An estimated 4,800 healthtech startups are leveraging cutting-edge technologies to help fight the pandemic in India. The rapid rise of these start-ups exhibits that India is strongly advocating the use of technology to strengthen its healthcare ecosystem and provide much needed quality care to its citizens.

Sources:

https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/

https://yourstory.com/

https://inc42.com/

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Dashboards & Webpages:

Microsoft has launched a new interactive dashboard to provide information on the spread of the virus. The map highlights the total number of cases so far (18,59,000 as of today with 114,979+ deaths in over 175 countries) which is further broken down into cases per country. The tool pulls live data from variety of sources such as WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and Wikipedia.

Apart from this pandemic, populations have to address another menace in the form of false news, videos and content that are flooding social channels. To counter these, Facebook owned WhatsApp has launched a coronavirus-related information website in partnership with WHO, UNICEF and UNDP. This page has latest and accurate info for general population, governments and healthcare professionals enabling them to communicate efficiently in these tragic times.

Quro is a Covid-19 risk assessment tool developed by Medius Health, an AI digital health company in Australia. This easy-to-use online conversational platform is in accordance with WHO guidelines, and aids in determining  your level of risk based on your symptoms, medical & travel history. It thereby imparts accurate detailed education on the virus and collects data for healthcare providers for early intervention.

Mobile Apps:

Tech giants – Apple and Google – recently announced a collaboration for developing a decentralised contact tracing tool which will aid an individual in determining an exposure to someone infected with Covid-19. This technology will work via smartphone’s bluetooth system and will work on both android and iOS.

Many countries are working vehemently to develop contact tracing mobile apps that could aid in arresting the spread of the novel coronavirus. India has launched, Arogya Setu app, which works through GPS and bluetooth. This android and iOS app informs an asymptotic person when she is in close proximity with a covid infected person. It sends alerts on the mobile of the person along with instructions for isolation.

Singapore uses TraceTogether app which runs on the aforementioned principle. France is working to develop a similar app for its citizens. However, fingers have been raised on the ‘official’ use of such apps for security and data governance reasons.

Education Tools:

As increasing number of countries have shut down schools and colleges, there are various online tools available which can be used by students and educators. Ekstep, an on-demand open learning platform, facilitates creation and consumption of educational content. Plenty of educational content is available on the app which can be used by students in a self-paced manner. Online tutoring platform Vedantu is providing free live classes for all its courses including IIT preparation modules. Latest ed-tech unicorn, Byju’s, is offering free access to its learning app till the end of April.

This comprehensive list by UNESCO can help you to pick the most apt one suiting your objective.

Regional Languages Platforms:

Regional language content start-ups in India have started publishing accurate content in local languages related to coronavirus in order to tackle misinformation. Josh Talks has added advisories to all its videos on eight different languages and has also initiated a series of videos by doctors and healthcare professionals spreading more awareness about the disease. These videos are dubbed in local languages for people to easily understand. Local news platform Lokal, which delivers local news, information and classifieds to 900 million non-English speaking users in India, is amplifying awareness through sharing relevant and accurate info, emergency contact numbers, videos etc.

The novel coronavirus global pandemic is a medical emergency that also requires a substantial individual effort to combat its spread and impact. We should make sure that only authentic information is gained and spread for the benefit of all.

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Healthcare in India has lagged in adoption of technologies, but digital technologies are now pushing the country in the right direction. Technology driven transformation has happened in many sectors like Mobile and Telecom, Aadhaar based eGovernance, Fintech and Banking. Healthcare is likely to go through a digital transformation now.

Technology has already taken its toll on the Hospital Information Systems [HIS] market. Large HIS vendors have exited the market. Either they have lost interest and exited or have been acquired. On the other hand, many tier-II incumbent players are not able to shift out to cloud because of their long term negotiated contracts in client-server model. The newer cloud-based players are comparatively smaller in size and yet to reach size and scale. The HIS market is ready for complete disruption by Digital Health!

Now is the Era of Mobile-First Apps. Small Data ^ = Big Data. The time has come when you don’t need big monolithic HIS software to run hospitals. Now you can do a lot with small mobile based Apps for every function. Clinical evidence-based medicine has got a new meaning with Digital devices run on Artificial Intelligence being introduced. These devices can automate Laboratory Reports, read Radiology reports better, do accurate differential Diagnosis, pin point relevant Order sets, send Referrals, drug refill alerts and follow-up reminders. Disease management has gone Digital and the devices are learning fast and outcomes getting better with every new patient.

However, the old HIS and EMR systems or even the new breed Digital Health Apps lack credible Global Digital Health Standards. Hence, they exist in silos and don’t interact with each other or the larger Healthcare ecosystem. The data cannot be referred for any meaningful analysis. For example, we still don’t know clearly the size, scale and depth of the Dengue, Chikungunya and H1N1, Flu epidemics that strike us every year. Hence, we are always left gasping for breath when the seasonal spike starts. India is already the Diabetes capital of the world with 70 million cases and counting. We still don’t have standard protocols based Digital Disease Management Platform.

The HIS/EMR market in India requires EHR and Meta Data Standards based XML wrapper objects that can help the existing systems to communicate with the external world in a Standardized format.

We need centralized Registries for uniquely identifying the Patient, Provider and the Facility where the treatment was carried out. We need Reference data dictionaries for standardizing the Diagnosis, Prognosis, Procedures, Laboratory tests, Radiological examinations, Drug prescriptions. This should be the common lookup so that everyone can be interoperable. The need for such Central Registries and Lookup Dictionaries is of paramount importance. Though the vital question remains, as to who will build and manage it. Should it be privately owned and controlled or publicly funded and managed.

Health Insurance sector has similar challenges. Private Health Insurance covers about 3% of India Population. There are 17+ Private Insurance companies that also do business in Health Insurance. 4 Public Sector Companies also cover Health Insurance. Four Private Insurance companies whose core business is only Health Insurance.

Public Health insurance covers about 10-17% of India Population. 80+% is Out of Pocket expenses. About 2% of India’s population falls below the poverty line every year due to unaffordable hospitalization expenses. Now the Central Government Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) has come to the rescue of most of the uninsured population. PMJAY is set to cover 40-50% of India’s Population. In absolute numbers the market is set to expand from the current 150 million people and go up to 500 million people.

Obviously, the TPA business which has been servicing only the private health insurance i.e. 3% of India’s population, must gear up to support PMJAY covering over 40% of India’s population. Hence TPA business is ready for disruption. The number of daily claims is set to go up by multiple times.

All these claims pipelines cannot be processed manually. We need to use high end technology to process the claims. We need a Standardized Claims format. The TPA market in India requires XML based standard Claims wrapper object that can help the existing systems to communicate with the Hospital HIS/EMR world and the Health Insurance world in a Standardized format.

Globally, winds of change are evident. Digital is totally changing the way Health Insurance business has been run in the past. CVS has been building retail Primary Care centers and Diagnostics in its Pharmacies. Now with CVS Purchasing Aetna! John Hancock is shifting from traditional Life Insurance model to incentivize longer, healthier lives. In brief, they will move away from Life insurance model to Disease management and Precision medicine. Blockchain based Unique Identifiers are emerging. AI based start-ups are working on meta data driven Discharge Summary, Hospital Billing and Claims, Intelligent Claims Adjudication and Fraud detections. The Digital Tech Giants are becoming Healthcare companies. The lines are beginning to blur.

Is India far behind? Not really, India has a habit of leapfrogging stages, specifically with regard to Telecom and FinTech sectors. It will now happen to Healthcare. A Digital Healthcare Ecosystem is already taking shape.

About Author

Dr Pankaj Gupta,

Head – Digital Health, ACCESS Health International

pankaj.gupta@accessh.org

The post Digital will Drive Access to Healthcare appeared first on New Age Healthcare.

Investigations

By using the latest technology in photography, scanning, filming, as well as complex databases, the range of microscopy has boomed further than ever imagined. This has enabled doctors to do more thorough investigations in many fields from general medicine to oncology. The technology behind MRIs, CAT scans, and X-rays has also developed immensely, thus permitting doctors to go much deeper into scanning their patients. By gaining access to more detailed information about their patients, doctors can make more accurate diagnoses and develop targeted treatment plans.

Patient Care

You may be tempted to think that only the biggest of technological breakthroughs can make a change in medicine. Databases, which have been used in IT development for years now, have enabled patient records to be digitalised. This has had immensely positive effects on the quality of patient care because it has reduced the human error factor. For instance, doctors can now be alerted about allergies or intolerances that patients have instead of searching for these in physical files. This might make the difference between life and death in some cases.

Diagnostics

It is still databases that will change the world of diagnostics. Alongside the enhanced investigations that doctors can now conduct, they have access to systems that can help them interpret them. The true gift of a good doctor lies in the quality of the interpretation. While this will remain the case, memorizing endless details about the pathological spectrum is no longer a requirement because this information can be made available in just a few easy clicks. This will help the doctor get immediate access to very detailed data and make a thorough diagnosis for the patients.

Practice Management

Technology has already made running a medical practice much easier for the entire staff. Nowadays, specialized software is available that can automate everything from appointment books to patient records and even the accounting and billing. Getting this type of software has greatly improved the quality of care that people get in small practices, as well as hospitals and other large medical facilities. It has helped doctors get quick access to patient files, as well as their medical history, which has optimized the entire consultation plan.

Surgical Procedures

Surgery has developed immensely in the past years because doctors can now reach deeper and deeper to make physical changes to smaller and smaller tissues. With technology, doctors have gained a range of movement and the ability to make very fine movements. Areas of the body that were previously considered unreachable are now well within their reach because they are not limited to instruments anymore. Doctors can now use technical appliances as an extension of their hands that can get them into the deepest, narrowest, and smallest places in the human body.

Research

Technology can help doctors improve their research in every single field. In fact, doctors and tech experts can work together to unravel the greatest mysteries of medicine. Research is a multidisciplinary field where the best and the brightest in their fields can join forces. The human body can be dissected all the way down to cellular and molecular level and natural processes can be simulated in pre-set conditions and it is all because technology has gotten a medical interpretation. The extremely fast pace at which the tech world is breaking new boundaries can be directly linked to a very exciting future in medical research as well.

As you can see, a new age is medicine is certainly coming and it is the latest technological breakthroughs that have brought it on. Doctors and tech gurus are about to change the face of traditional medicine and take it to an entirely new level. Getting medical attention will be a service available to those who need it all over the world.

About Author:

Tanya Mayer is a freelance writer. She is interested in writing on various topics relating to marketing, small business and tech. You can reach her at mayert685@gmail.com.

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Majority of the impurities in water can be removed with modern water purification technologies such as RO (Reverse Osmosis). The advent of this technology has enhanced the plausibility to get safe and clean drinking water in households. Most of the water-purifiers available in the market adopt this technology of Reverse Osmosis membrane purification which helps in the removal of both chemical and microbiological pollutants in the water. It has become more essential for the consumers to understand this RO process and its effect on the water quality.

The claim made by most of the water-purifier makers in the country that it makes the water totally clean is only partially true. You will find it hard to believe that some of the essential elements of water are lost during the RO process. The reason lies in the dynamics of the reverse osmosis process. The RO process does lead to removal of the harmful pollutants but on the flip side it also leads to the elimination of some of the very important minerals within water. This leads to a fall in pH of water, making it more acidic and bitter in taste. To improve the taste, these purifiers overcomes mixes a stream of impure water (by bypassing part of tap water through UF membrane and add to the RO water) to balance pH & improve taste. This procedure does improve the taste of water but also adds more pollutants to water that we all use. Hence, we cannot be completely sure that the water coming out of the purifier is safe to drink and non-harmful to health.

A newly launched water-purifier range is equipped with a transformative technology that will address the issues mentioned above. Havells water-purifiers are equipped with advanced purification technology with double UV purification that remove all impurities from water. 100% water passes through the RO membrane and then UV purification to ensure absolutely safe and healthy drinking water. Mineralz fortification, which is integral to this technology, balances the pH of the water by adding essential minerals to it and thereby maintains the taste of the water enhancing its quality for the consumers.

A distinctive feature of this innovative 8-stage water purification process is the presence of revitalizer which breaks water molecules into smaller clusters, making it biologically active and this leading to easy absorption of water and improved hydration in our body. This entire purification process is repeated after every 4 hours to ensure healthier and tastier water.

The product also features design excellency where paramount importance is given to the ease of placement/installation of the product and its usage. It is equipped with a first-of-a-kind iProtect purification monitoring system that makes sure the proper functioning of the purification process at all times. These purifiers have a very user-friendly interface with the presence of a touch screen in the high-end model. Calibration of the quantity of the water coming out of the purifier is an added advantage which the consumers will like. Havells has developed a complete range of RO & UV water purifiers and UV water purifiers which deploys the new-age technology for providing safe and pure drinking water.

You can write to wecarewaterpurifier@havells.com for any product related information.

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A jamboree of well renowned names and start-ups in medical devices are showcasing their MRI technologies and related products at the on-going AOCR 2018 (17th Asian Oceanian Congress of Radiology) in Mumbai, India from Jan 25-28^th, 2018. This marquee event, in the field of radiology and diagnostic imaging, reaching Indian shores after a gap of 25 years, is attended by well-known radiologists, medical students, hospitals management personnel and eminent thought leaders in this space.

Philips is a leading innovator in the field of MRI, enabling efficiency and superb clinical results for diagnostics and therapy.

Philips Healthcare, a pioneer in medical devices and diagnostic solutions are the premium sponsors for this event and are showcasing their best-in-class technology and products in medical imaging. On the 1^st day of the event, Philips launched a new powerful imaging solution in the premier segment, Prodiva 1.5T CX, which is built on proven dStram digital broadband technology which accelerates patient throughput and enhances the clinical performance through simplified and highly guided workflow.

Mr. Karthik Raj, MR Applications Specialist, Philips India, explains the reason due to which this revolutionary product produces consistent and high quality imaging for the clinicians: “The dStream digital broadband technology is at the core of Prodiva 1.5T CX which digitizes the signal in the coil itself that helps to capture the MR signal in its most pure form. This leads to increase SNR (Signal-to-noise ratio) to enhance the image quality and to reduce the time taken by clinician to examine the patient. He further explains the incorporation of “Smart Automation’ and ‘Breeze Workflow’ within the product: “Many of the standard tasks such as coil selection and table positioning are automated using the product and hence results in streamlining the routine imaging process. There is a significant reduction in the positioning steps through Breeze Workflow which reduce examination time and ultimately increases patient volume. The favorable operational design of the product such as reduced power consumption, lower height, and lower room specifications for placing this is very advantageous for the hospitals, diagnostic centers and the radiologists”.

Mr. Raj further adds “So far we are witnessing amazing interest for the product. There have been many installations in India, prominent being Fortis Hospital, Vansant Kunj Delhi, Mahajan Imaging, Delhi and MyCure Hospital, Vizag.”

Some of the salient features of Prodiva 1.5 CT which differentiates it from other similar technologies in the market are:

Robust techniques for routing high quality imaging 

Provides access to imaging techniques such as fat suppression, motion correction and metal artifact reduction.

Accelerate workflow

Reduces the number of positioning steps by 34% and hence enables to accelerate daily exam workflow

Better adaption to different patient anomalies

Breeze Anterior coils are thin and flexible which can be easily fitted around different types of body shapes and sizes.

Reduce energy costs and maintain high uptime

Effective design with smart power management reduces the overall power consumption

You can experience the various aspects of Prodiva 1.5CTx at the Philip Health booth at AOCR 2018 from 25-28 Jan. There are experts who will explain you how the product drives clinical performance, enhances patient and user experience and ultimately lead to the more accurate and confident diagnosis. Watch out this space for more live action and new product launches at the AOCR 2018.

The post Enhance clinical performance through digital technology in MR systems appeared first on New Age Healthcare.

According to a recent study, 13% of Indians are under the threat of suffering from OSA. Its is increasingly common disorder, with approx. 6 million adults in India have this but 80% remain undiagnosed and untreated. The prevalence in India is about 24 per cent of men (mostly over 40 years) and nine per cent of women. The diagnosis and management of this condition is rapidly evolving and includes the patient using a CPAP machine to facilitate removal of obstructions to breathing, and surgery

Philips Healthcare will be launching a revolutionary solution (DreamMapper) for managing sleep apnea patients in India. The launch will happen on Nov 18th in Kolkata at NAPCON 2017 and will be broadcasted live here on Philips India Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/PhilipsIndia/ at 1 PM IST.

As a mobile app and online software, DreamMapper helps patients reach goals with sleep apnea therapy. It provides daily progress reports, track goals, provides tips and reminders, and motivates patients to stay on track with the sleep therapy.

More details about this revolutionary solution can be found here: http://bit.ly/2n5ySVi

Please share your views and feedback on this digital solution for sleep apnea patients.

The post A digital solution for sleep disorders appeared first on New Age Healthcare.

The world of healthcare analytics is vast and can encompass a wide range of data that has the incredible potential to tell stories about health and healthcare delivery: right from individual patients to entire populations.Having numbers and an easy-to-use visualization at hand gives providers and caregivers the power to not only look into the lives of individual patients but also track the ongoing activities in their organizations. Simply showing visualizations are not enough and to fully understand their value, healthcare organizations have to take a few steps beyond basic graphs.

The Case for Data Visualization

In the words of Edward O. Wilson, the father or social biology,

“You teach me, I forget.
You show me, I remember.
You involve me, I understand.”

There are many disparate data sources healthcare providers have to deal with: EHRs, departmental data, claims data, resource utilization, administrative data, etc. Consolidating the data and spreading it out in a visually adaptive manner offers a more agile approach to managing complex population health data.

Data visualization was developed with the aim to make it easier to gain actionable insights from volumes of information and work on improving health programs, clinical healthcare delivery, and post-episode care management. Visualization provides real value in learning from disparate data sources, finding outliers, bringing out hidden trends out on the front, and delivering better health outcomes.

Streamlining Different Data Sources into a Single Source of Truth

Since the data pertaining to a patient’s health comes in from various sources, it is vital to pool all the data sets and obtain an aggregated, standard format of data every authorized person can view and manipulate.

Data in the healthcare industry can broadly be categorized into two sources:

• Claims data: that comes from payers and contains extremely uniform and updated data about the care patients receive and how they are billed for it. This data is usually structured and has all the meaningful data required for provider reimbursement.
• Clinical data: this data comes in from the providers’ end and contains valuable information about their diagnoses, claims, and medical history. While this data isn’t often structured, incorporates data elements critical to analyze a patient’s health in every time frame.

Fine-tuning Real-Time Visualization

The amount of data healthcare institutions aggregate is enormous: by 2012, it was estimated to be a whopping 150 exabytes (150 million * million * million) and is growing at a rate of 48% per year. As the volume grows, healthcare organizations need state-of-the-art, real-time analytical capabilities to improve the care quality and its effectiveness. Real-time analytics can turn the tables in ways more than one:

• Monitoring end-to-end care delivery across a wide range of facilities.
• Observing the progress of clinical decision support systems.
• Identifying overhead cost drivers and detect care or documentation gaps.

Since data visualization holds great advantage to understand the going-ons in the organization in real-time, here are some key elements that count as best practices for data visualization:

• Customized reports: Each set of users in healthcare requires different metrics and different orders. Offering customized reports with specific visualization provides actionable insights and can answer specific questions about risks, rewards, and success of the organization.
• Visually adaptive: Data presented on the dashboards has to be complete with functional and visual features that aim to improve cognition and quick interpretation. Data listed in a color coded-manner will provide physicians with functional features and real-time alerts.
• Create actionable insights: A dashboard or any other visualization tool will provide clinicians with the data, but unless someone looks at it, it will go unnoticed and may have potentially critical outcomes. Users should be made aware of how to review the dashboard, drill down to every immediate level, and initiate corrective actions.

• The end user’s ultimate need: It’s paramount that end users can communicate their needs and demands and what is even more important is that their demands and performance indicators are incorporated well in advance of structuring the report.

Wrap-up with Healthcare IT

By leveraging healthcare IT, organizations can have their hands on simple but effective visualization and take a look at additional, important information that might have been difficult to notice in tabular format. Here are some ways healthcare IT can drive real-time data visualization to success:

• Immediate access and sharing: Putting bidirectional interoperability to use, providers can access and share relevant data across the network, despite technological barriers.
• Clear data visualization: Graphic, color-coded cues help physicians swiftly learn about the areas that need performance improvement or track the growth their organization is making.
• Drilling down: To learn more about the reason behind certain shortfall, physicians can always drill down and narrow their area of focus to pinpoint the anomaly, and take quick remedial actions.

Driving Value with Visualization

With healthcare IT now an integral part of the value-based care system, there is little doubt that convenient, real-time data visualization will be heavily used to achieve positive health outcomes. Combining real-time data with advanced analytics will completely reshape how healthcare IT can improve clinical and operational outcomes. Once physicians move away from long, incomprehensible data flows, and find an alternative that helps them instinctively read, isolate, and act upon the insights, only then can we be one step closer to a data-driven value-based care.

About the Author

Mr. Abhinav Shashank, Co-Founder & CEO at Innovaccer, is an expert in population health management and robust technologies. For the better part of the decade he has been working to revolutionize healthcare delivery with 25+ value-focused organization and making over 10 million lives better. He has also spoken at numerous healthcare conference on the role of HealthIT in modern healthcare. You can reach out to him at: abhinav.shashank@innovaccer.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinavshashank/

Twitter: @abhinavshashank

The post Why is Data the Medicine to Cure Modern Healthcare? appeared first on New Age Healthcare.

Big Data has application for both healthcare providers and payers.  Providers, which are loaded with unstructured data in the form of scanned documents, images etc. can use big data solutions to integrate it with the structured data enabling process modifications, identification of associated risk factors, comparison of images for various treatment procedures & research and hence improve the overall quality of care. Payers, whether private or government, want to convert claims data into insights for fraud detection and patient compliance. Big Data solutions not only provide integration of claims and procedure data but also facilitate integration of high volume of different varieties and sources of data. However, organizations need to keep in mind the issue of data security and privacy while implementing big data solutions.

IBM Watson has been creating ripples of transformation in the healthcare industry from the last few years. It has collaborated with leading providers and medical institutes around the globe to prove more personalized care and hence increase healthcare outcomes and reduce costs. In the coming years technologies such as IBM Watson will have a significant role in solving healthcare issues for developing countries as well.

A recent example is the recently announced IBM Watson partnership with Bangalore, India based Manipal Group of Hospitals. Watson technology will reveal insights that would help oncologists provide cancer patients with individualized, evidence based cancer care across India where deficient healthcare infrastructure and accessibility is a serious issue. Partnerships like these can immensely help in easing healthcare concerns for population.

A long way to go, but big data and analytics can certainly be the ammunition required to tackle the villains associated with providing efficient healthcare.

The post ‘Big Data’ – An Untamed Superhero appeared first on New Age Healthcare.

Medical Devices:

The robot products developed by Perfint Technologies are used for ablation, drug delivery and biopsy. These affordable and unique devices are sold under the brand name ‘Robio’ in SE Asian countries, Europe and Latin America. This four year old start-up is now working to develop a new robot product, Maxio, which will make complex life-saving procedures much easier to perform with high success rate and with the introduction of which Perfint plans to enter markets like the US, Japan and Korea. The price of these devices ranges from $150,000 to $300,000. With $17 million from various venture capitalist and current revenue hovering around Rs. 50 crore, Perfint aims to ten-fold the revenue to around Rs. 550 crore in the next four years.

Nano Drugs:

Invictus Oncology, a Delhi-based start-up is developing a drug smaller than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, which immerses into the tumor, shrinks it by cutting off blood supply and continues to sit on the tumor till it dies. The brain behind this technology built it in his lab in Harvard Medical School and has been further developed by a group of scientists who relocated to India.

Diagnostics:

Core Diagnostics, a Gurgaon-based start-up, offers specialized tests in cardiology, endocrinology and oncology which are unavailable in India. Patients used to send the test samples overseas and the results came back in around three weeks costing about Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 1 lakh. Core diagnostics, backed by Artiman Ventures, aims to make these tests available in India for as low as Rs. 4000 to Rs. 50,000 with results in just 48 hours. This startup has tied with 50 specialists and physicians working in US to train their Indian counterparts.

Computational Imaging:

Tonbo Imaging, a startup in Bangalore, has developed an imaging technology that has also made inroads into the defense technology such as drones of the armed forces around the globe. Artiman Ventures have infused Rs. 34 crore in this startup that will be utilized for R&D enhancement and team expansion in India, the U.S and Israel.

Personalized Cancer Therapy:

Mitra Biotech, a Bangalore-based bio-technology organization, has developed the ‘OncoprintR’ technology that allows doctors to differentiate with great deal of accuracy the drugs which will work on a cancer patient from the drugs which will have no clinical effect. This technology saves the patient from undergoing a series of drug regimes that often results in side-effects and associated complications. Mitra has struck a deal with several leading hospitals in India and abroad for delivering personalizes treatment options. Imagine what changes this technology can bring in a country like India where nearly 6 lakhs Indians die of cancer every year where 70% of them belong to the age group 30-70yrs.

Stem Cells:

Stempeutics Research, a startup focused on stem cells in alliance with Vignani technologies, a niche engineering services company is developing ‘Stempeuron’ an automated, point-of-care medical device for isolation of stem cells from humans. The device helps to extract good stem cells out of the tissue quickly whereas the current procedure of bringing fat tissues to the lab and processing it for isolating stem cells is time consuming, cumbrous and has a poor viability rate. The alliance is working to reduce the cost of their device to below Rs. 20 lakh that is much below the cost of such devices in US which is around Rs. 1 crore.

India ranks 4^th in global general cosmetic surgery market, which is valued at $40. Billion in 2013, with 850,000 cosmetic surgeries a year compared to US, ranked 1^st with 3,100,000 such procedures. Indian firms such as Stempeutics and Vignani which are still in the research and development phase are leaving no stone unturned to make a mark in such markets and increase their presence across the globe. This new crop of go-getters and innovative startups are here to make a difference and bring India on the medical technology globe in the years to come. Watch out for the rise of similar Indian organizations and make their mark.

The post Indian Healthcare Startups: Shifting the paradigm in medical technology appeared first on New Age Healthcare.