Startups alleviate developing nations’ healthcare costs

Countries like Indonesia and the Philippines are still grappling with a shortage of healthcare staff, resulting in underserved patients. Because of this, healthcare firms are increasingly turning to digitalisation as a solution. However, lower-income countries often face investment prioritisation challenges due to forecasts, such as INSEAD’s study projecting a significant 75% increase in health expenditures across Southeast Asia, which poses a challenge for their investment decisions.

Healthcare startups with operations in South Korea, Singapore, and other markets in the Asia Pacific have stepped up to help hospitals and patients save costs through their innovations. They developed applications that can be accessed by patients through their smartphones and partnered with governments or non-profit organisations (NGOs).

Easy access to diagnoses

AIHealth.SG detects and evaluates one’s risk of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) using AI to assess blood pressure, body mass index, and other data inputs all with just a tap of a smartphone. This allows patients to monitor their vital signs directly.

“Our AI, which is very unique to us, runs on smartphones, and these smartphones are low-resource phones, dating back to 2016 upwards. That means it’s accessible by the majority of the population in a lot of these low- and middle-income countries,” said Shaun Rossiter, CEO and founder of AIHealth.SG.

Despite being an advanced technology, AIHealth.SG said deploying their software to patients costs nothing with the help of a country’s government.

“If this was funded by a government, in terms of getting it out to the general population, then they simply need to download the app, or, integrate within the Ministry of Health app that they have, or private hospital group,” Rossiter explained further.

“One challenge to adoption by the patients who are afraid that maybe

AI could take their identity or do this or do that, when in fact, that’s not what it’s designed to do. User experience was also a challenge as was using low-resource smartphones in non-connected environments,” said Rossiter. But after the COVID-19 pandemic, Rossiter said it would be easier to address this hesitation barrier because patients know that technology will help them understand risks in their health.

AIHealth.SG is a startup based in Singapore that started operations in April 2022 to provide a library of health risk assessment tools using AI technology available to new and existing private and public health, telemedicine, insurance, pharmaceutical, and corporate entities either as software as a service (SaaS) or white label offering.

Reduced MRI scan time Being inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is difficult for patients, especially the sick and elderly, for its long scan times, noise, and crucial requirements.

Patients are mandated to stay inside and be as very motionless as possible. Some even suffer from claustrophobia. MRI software service provider and startup, AIRS Medical’s, Jaeyeon Yoon said his co-founders’ mother was facing the same issue which led them to run their healthcare startup that seeks to minimise scan time.

With AIRS Medical’s deep learning technology called SwiftMR, it reduces by up to 50% the MRI scans that usually take 20 to 90 minutes. The reason behind longer scan times is to create a high-quality image and if there is a lower scan time, it will compromise the quality. What AIRS Medical’s software does is to improve the lowquality image that was generated from the accelerated scan.

“If the MRI scan time is reduced to half, they can only spend half time inside the MRI scanner, and also their waiting time will be reduced to take an MRI exam,” said Yoon, who is AIRS Medical’s business development head. Yoon added that using SwiftMR will reduce costs as healthcare providers do not need to replace their old scanners.

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