India faces shortage in healthcare infra, expand reach to manage demand-supply gap: Shyatto Raha, MyHealthcare

The pandemic has proved to be a defining time for the healthcare sector, with the importance of technology, more specifically the use of digital technology coming to the fore. Hospitals became inundated with patients during the second wave and the sheer gap in the number of doctors and healthcare professionals available as compared to the need clearly highlighted a huge shortfall along with the absence of a patient-care ecosystem. Using digital technologies to enable remote patient care will ease the burden on our healthcare ecosystem and also allow us to be better prepared for the anticipated third wave. In conversation with Financial Express Online Shyatto Raha, Founder and CEO of Healthcare shared how their new remote patient monitoring framework in collaboration with Max Healthcare will address the healthcare delivery gap using a data-driven care process. Excerpts:

What is Max MyHealth+? How will it help the patients?

Max Healthcare and MyHealthcare have collaborated to launch India’s first, device integrated patient monitoring framework, Max MyHealth+. The launch of the remote patient care monitoring will allow Max Healthcare to expand its geography of care, allowing patients from across India and globally to stay connected with Max Hospitals and its doctors, and will reduce the time patients have to spend inside hospitals As part of the remote patient monitoring, patients can use the platform Max MyHealth+ to monitor their vitals with clinical devices integrated to the app, allowing clinical readings to flow seamlessly from the device into the app and into the EMR, for the doctor’s review.

How will this platform work?

The Max MyHealth+ ecosystem built in collaboration with MyHealthcare, has integrated Blood Pressure monitors from Omron, ECG and Heart Rate devices from Kardia and Blood Sugar monitoring devices from Accu-Chek. The vitals are monitored using AI tools, which help in ECG interpretation, vital alerts to doctors if the parameters are outside the permissible limits. The device integrated offerings will allow patients to use clinical devices at home, which are seamlessly connected to the Max MyHealth+ app.

The clinical data captured is managed with automated trend analysis and vital alerts. Remote care monitoring and use of care programmes, will help Max Healthcare manage their patients wherever they may be located. India faces today a significant shortage of healthcare providers, doctors, nurses and speciality care facilities. Expanding the reach of our healthcare infrastructure is key in being able to manage the demand – supply gap for healthcare services. Use of digital technology solutions such as telemedicine, e-pharmacy, tele-radiology, tele-ICU, etc., will be key drivers in reshaping India’s healthcare framework.

How are startups like yours supporting in the fight with covid?

Startups like ours, have shifted our platform focus to telemedicine and building an ecosystem of care centered around virtual consultations.  This helped our patients access healthcare with ease and use our services to reach out to doctors for video consultations, expedite diagnostic tests and avail medicine delivery while at home and in case the need arises use our MyHealthcare@Home for homecare monitoring during the pandemic. We were also quick to adapt to the constantly changing needs of doctors, nurses and patients – which helped increase adoption of the new ecosystem.

Shyatto Raha, Founder and CEO of Healthcare

Another key learning for us was empathy – the healthcare sector unfortunately witnesses emotions and anxiety as the very foundation of a patient’s mindset when seeking care. While physical meetings with doctors help calm patients and their families, trying to manage this over virtual consultations was quite a challenge.  Our patient support team worked like frontline workers in managing patients before their doctor consultation and also with their follow up care. This required us to ensure that our platform technology and our operating processes had patient empathy at the very centre of it all.  The pandemic has been tough 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.

How will your platform help India’s covid preparedness to tackle the 3rd wave?

India witnessed widespread distress during the second covid wave and would certainly like to be prepared for the third wave. The Max MyHealth+ platform will help us ease the pressure on our frontline workers and support them in their endeavour to save lives.  The platform will help monitor the vitals of patients with mild symptoms in real time and will immediately alert the doctor across the Max Health network if the parameters are out of permissible range. This will help the doctors devote time to the  patients who are in hospital while keeping a close watch on the ones who are at home through the app.

What are your future plans?

MyHealthcare is working towards its Series B investment over the next few months. This will help our expansion in India, especially in Tier 2 towns, cities and allow us to scale our geographic expansion by taking the MyHealthcare ecosystem to the Asia, Middle East and the US market. We hope to become synonymous with digital healthcare ecosystems in India and in the coming 5 years, we want to be available in even Tier 2 cities.