The 10 best e healthcare solution provider companies dec 2017

www.insightssuccess.in December 2017

The way of business solutions

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THE BEST - healthcare

SOLUTION PROVIDER

C O M P A N I E S

Upcoming Developments Blockchain: A Cure for Healthcare IT Problems

Tech-n-Trends

Hospital Wi-Fi: Making Healthcare Smarter Gautam Dey MD & CEO

ICT Health:

Reinventing Technology to Bring Better Quality and Convenience to Healthcare

Editorial

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ndian healthcare sector is widely diversified and full of opportunities. Currently, it is one of the fastest growing sectors and is expected to reach a whopping USD 275 billion in the coming years. Given the ever increasing competition in the healthcare industry, businesses are looking to explore the latest dynamics and trends, which will have a positive impact on their business and society as a whole. Evolution in the Internet of Things (IOT) and advancement of technology, along with the growing demands for population health management, and the need to cut healthcare cost, has led to the intensified demand for e-healthcare solutions. E-Health provides a cost-effective healthcare delivery platform along with opportunities for research advancement and health-related activities that can benefit both low and high-income countries. This has even led the World Health Organization in promoting e-healthcare services.

E-Healthcare Gaining a Leadership Role in Digital Health

The global e-healthcare market is growing at a rapid pace and the technological developments, innovations, and the use of electronic devices are driving the market even further. The trends currently affecting this market are geographical, socio-economic, economic, consumer-centric, political, and cultural. Their overall effect on clients and consumer preference will have a major impact in how this market will structure itself in the years to come. The increasing acceptance of these systems by medical practitioners across the globe is predicted to offer promising openings for prominent players in the market.

A recent interesting initiative from the Government of India is the plan to set up ‘SEHAT’, Social Endeavour for Health and Telemedicine, launched at Common Service Centre (CSC) with an aim to empower rural citizens by providing access to information, knowledge, skills, and other services in various sectors through the intervention of digital technologies and fulfilling the vision of a ‘Digital India’.

The e-healthcare initiatives which are a part of ‘Digital India’ are commendable and aim at providing effective and economical healthcare services to all citizens. The SEHAT program aims to make use of technology and portals to enable people in maintaining health records and book online appointments with various departments of different hospitals.

India’s health reform journey has already gained motion. While the journey is challenging, the outcomes and the opportunities will continue to move. With best-around-the-globe clinical talent, business managers, and policy evangelists, India seems to be well positioned to achieve its healthcare vision and provide its populace with the best-inclass healthcare outcomes.

Nikita Doiphode

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Senior Editor Shraddha Deshpande Managing Editor Nikita Doiphode Co-Editors Sachin Bhandare Poulami Das Contributors Shweta Priyadarshini Art & Design Director Amol Kamble Co-designer Rahul Kavanekar Picture Editor Alex Noel Art Editor Shweta Ambilwade Visualiser Shweta Shinde Business Development Manager Akansha Garewal Marketing Manager Dhruv Apte Business Development Executives Joan, Rutuja, Priyanka, Divya Research Analyst David Circulation Manager Vivek Database Management Sharad Technology Consultant Swapnil Patil sales@insightssuccess.com

December, 2017 Corporate Ofď€ ces: Insights Success Media and Technology Pvt. Ltd. Off. No. 513 & 510, 5th Flr., Rainbow Plaza, Shivar Chowk, Pimple Saudagar, Pune, Maharashtra 411017 Phone - India: 020-69400110, 111, 112 Email: info@insightssuccess.in For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.in

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Cover Story

ICT Health: Reinventing Technology to Bring Better Quality and Convenience to Healthcare

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Indian Health Organisation: Introducing the new Advancement of Telemedicine in the Arena of e-Healthcare

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Insider’s Opinion Computer Technology Transforming Healthcare

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Expert’s Insight E-Healthcare: Harnessing the Power of Technology

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Impact and Importance Digital Revolution Transforming Healthcare Industry

34 ARTICLES Tech Evolution

Tech-n-Trends

Blockchain: A Cure for Healthcare IT Problems

Vocal-Biomarkers: Technology for Analyzing Emotions

Hospital Wi-Fi: Making Healthcare Smarter

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Upcoming Developments

Curofy: Doctor’s Appealing Platform

20 Navia Life Care: Leveraging Innovative Technologies to Build Customized Solutions for Patient Engagement

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The Flourishing Field of E-Healthcare

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ver the last couple of decades, developments in the information and communication technology have made the most profound impact on healthcare management all over the world. Globally, there is a considerable international interest in exploiting the potential of digital solutions to enhance the quality and safety of healthcare. Implementations of transformative e-health technologies are underway, often at a very considerable cost.

Many health program implementers and policy-makers are exploring the extent to which e-health can help address the challenges faced by resource-constrained health markets in terms of the availability, quality, and financing of healthcare. As a result, there is a significant potential for e-health to deliver cost-effective, quality healthcare.

Given the potential benefits of e-Healthcare, we are introducing some of the most prominent organizations in the industry who are capable of leading their clients towards excellence by supporting them beyond the advisory level.

“The 10 Best E-Healthcare Solution Provider Companies” issue aspires to assist organizations to find the right technology partner who has the resources and skills to deliver smart e-healthcare solutions with scalability and inventiveness.

The Cover Story features ICT Health, a dynamic care delivery organization empowering their care practices & operations with smarter technology accelerators that directly enable improved outcomes. It offers end-to-end solutions for healthcare domain including Information Systems related to Patient Administration, Electronic Health Records, Healthcare ERP, Imaging Solutions, Clinical Automation, Medical device technology etc.

Apart from this, we have presented Navia Life Care, a health technology company, focusing on patient care and enabling users to manage their health with simplicity. Curofy, a platform offering doctors a spam-free and secure environment to communicate with each. Hospytek aids in enhancing and managing medical device/equipment business by identifying veritable need to fulfilling it through a suitable suppliers and much more, all under a single platform.

DrLive is a healthcare platform to implement telemedicine programs on mobile devices. The highly secure platform is very easy to use and has proven its value in a variety of healthcare specialties and settings for patient follow ups, second opinions, and primary healthcare. eKincare, a wellness platform, integrates medical records, healthcare services, and leverages predictive analytics to design wellness initiatives and reduce healthcare costs. InnAccel has created India’s first MedTech innovation platform, anchored by state-of-the-art R&D facilities and a network of national and global partners, to drive such innovation, and transform healthcare globally. Medimojo is built with an interoperable platform to aggregate healthcare data from disparate sources which helps turn health data into insights that patients and healthcare professionals can use to make smarter and healthier decisions. PurpleDocs is an innovative cloud based offering that makes it easy for healthcare providers to instantly access healthcare information anytime, anywhere.

Additionally, we have interviewed Mansije Mishra, MD at Indian Health Organization, one of India’s leading healthcare benefits company enabling people to effectively manage their health while making quality healthcare affordable and accessible.

Scripted by our in-house editors, we have also included some remarkable articles titled “Blockchain: A Cure for Healthcare IT Problems” and “Hospital Wi-Fi: Making Healthcare Smarter”.

Also, to give meaningful insights and expand your knowledge base about the industry, we have included artcles written by industry experts titled, “E-Healthcare: Harnessing the power of technology” by Satish Kannan, Co-founder of DocsApp and “Digital Revolution Transforming Healthcare Industry” by Milind Pol, Sr. Vice President at Ohum Healthcare Solutions.

So flip through our magazine and explore interesting insights into the world of e-healthcare!

ICT Health:

Reinventing Technology to Bring Better Quality and Convenience to Healthcare

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rowing economic pressure of the ever-increasing healthcare costs and the suboptimal health outcomes are driving the search for new approaches towards health management. Innovation and new technology adoptions are crucial for better and faster outcomes in healthcare. Today, technology affects every single aspect of the modern society and is creating a revolution in the way healthcare is being delivered. From the widespread adoption of electronic medical records, to advances in bio-medical engineering and technology, modern healthcare and its delivery methods are changing at an ever increasing rate.

Among these technologies, Electronic Health (e-health) is a novel and proďŹ cient method for providing medical and healthcare services to the society and developing relations between specialists, patients and all the users of healthcare ecosystem. Use of e-health becomes more essential in developing countries where healthcare resources and medical

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“Every solution designed at ICT Health is aimed at creating a differentiating factor to our customers in terms of the quality of service and engaged patient experience”

Gautam Dey MD & CEO

services are not distributed well. Even if e-health would bring these types of efficiencies to the healthcare system, there are still challenges around investment and implementation that needs to be addressed. Execution and use of digital health services are questioned by many, mainly due to the ambiguity in patient privacy and security of data.

We are here to bring our partners’ vision into action through best practices acquired from over 100 healthcare facilities

Today, patients demand a higher value of care and a better quality of services. Healthcare providers are compelled to contribute greater value towards the communities they serve. Comprehending this requisite, ICT Health, a leading integrated clinical-technology company, offers end-to-end solutions for healthcare domain including Information Systems related to Patient Administration, Electronic Health Records, Healthcare ERP, Imaging Solutions, Clinical Automation and Medical device technology, IT Infrastructure and Managed Services, as well as outsourced clinical services including Hospital Management and Quality Accreditations.

ICT Health operates across the IMEA region and is looking to empower care practices and operations with smarter technology accelerators that directly result in improved outcomes. More than a hundred healthcare providers have harnessed ICT Health’s experience of nearly three decades, and have availed services from their locally based technology and consulting specialists.

Recognitions Ÿ Recipient of Frost and Sullivan Award – UAE Healthcare IT Company of the year 2017 Enabling Healthcare Technology (South Asia & Middle East), 2013. Ÿ Awarded ‘Arab Strategic Web Award’ in 2016 for Ministry of Health, Sultanate of Oman by Pan Arab Excellence. Ÿ Recognized by Silicon India as the ‘Company of the year’,2014 An Invigorating Frontrunner A renowned “thought leader” in the domain of healthcare informatics and clinical technologies, Gautam Dey is the Managing Director and the Chief Executive Officer of ICT Health. He is entrusted with the direct ownership of conceptualization and implementation of strategic plans in order to drive growth whilst simultaneously being accountable for the profits within the company's operations.

With over 25 years of presence in the healthcare and educational sphere, Gautam’s repertoire spreads across

COVER STORY experiences in Clinical Technology, Business Strategy, Profit Center Management, Quality & Performance, and Merger & Acquisition. He is an honors graduate from BITS-Pilani and holds a Strategic Management Diploma from IIM-Ahmedabad.

Gautam is a regional leader and has a firm vision of converging new age healthcare and advanced technologies for the enhancement of end-to-end clinical services. He advises upcoming entrepreneurs to focus on frugal innovation. “No solution should ever be more expensive than the problem,” states Gautam.

Widely travelled and an erudite orator, Gautam has the skill to evaluate situations and environments, intuitively identify areas of focus and drive teams and organizations towards delivering results. Moreover, he is an astute speaker on the subject of Healthcare and Technology and has evoked excitement, interest and action across the IMEA and is widely sought after for his sharp wit and imaginative insights.

Proffering end-to-end Solutions ICT Health is in the business of reinventing technology by conferring the power to do more with less, thus enabling the healthcare industry to extract more value out of the available resources.

ICT Health’s HINAI platform provides comprehensive functionality encompassing patient administration and Electronic Health Records. HINAI is an enterprise-class next-gen platform designed for the cloud. It incorporates all the current interoperability, privacy and security guidelines and is a world class systems integrator that provides a holistic view over the continuum of care.

Although designed for the cloud, HINAI can be installed on-premise, as an enterprise class Hospital Information System with integrated ERP and Revenue Cycle Management. Crafted using core java technologies and accentuated by mainstream open source platforms, HINAI helps hundreds of care providers routinely deliver safer, high quality healthcare services enriched with differentiated care experiences.

HINAI has been adapted to various functions across healthcare industry.

Electronic Health Records: HINAI EHR’s single page architecture brings together all aspects of care into a single

customizable window which helps improve patient care through better clinical support, care coordination and patient engagement.

Medical Image Management Solutions for Radiology: HINAI ImageNET brings patients, providers and diagnostic centers on a collaborative platform allowing access to images anywhere and anytime ensuring quick turnaround, thereby transforming care interventions and thus lowering the cost.

Laboratory Information Systems: HINAI Lab automates and streamlines the complete workflow and procedures and updates them to the EMR. It provides delta checks and automatic verification of test results based on predefined limits. It can also be configured for telepathology applications.

Patient Administration: HINAI PAS leverages the mainstream CRM and ICT technologies to enable organizations achieve a high level of patient satisfaction, thus creating a sustainable competitive advantage. It automates the patient administrative processes and workflows to achieve optimal resource utilization and higher efficiencies by eliminating redundancy and duplication of work.

Hospital Information and Management Systems: Through the HINAI Web platform, ICT Health provides a comprehensive Health Information and Management System which has been exclusively designed to manage the business needs of modern healthcare enterprises.

Pharmacy: HINAI Medics address the complex needs of the modern hospital pharmacy and enable users to achieve the benefits of a fully integrated and automated workflow including prescription, dispensing, review, and refilling, along with the effective monitoring of drug therapy.

Revenue Cycle Management: HINAI RCM is a fully integrated billing module that provides a complete end-toend revenue cycle management. From patient authorization checking to managing claims, they offer a wealth of technology tools that enhances the capability to access medical billing and financial reporting to streamline the entire operations.

EZR.care: EZR.care, an ICT Health’s initiative is a common thread woven across the healthcare continuum to improve scheduling, information exchange, appointment

COVER STORY

ICT Health is in the business of reinventing technology by giving you the power to do more with less show rates and increase overall efficiency by establishing an optimal referral management platform which is essential to patient safety and coordinated care. EZR.care helps care providers to build a private health network that makes it easier to access care, deliver care, earn from care & regulate care.

ICT Health also provides some value added services like mobile healthcare solution, social media solutions, systems integration, managed services, and consulting.

HINAI at a Glance Ÿ HINAI solution manages more than 6000 beds across 50+ facilities on a single instance. Ÿ HINAI system facilitates more than 5 million patient encounters annually. Ÿ HINAI Web is certified as a Complete EHR as per ONC 2014 standards with a usability score of 8.5/10. Ÿ Nearly 400,000,000 medical images are made available for reporting on HINAI ImageNet. “Inform, Collaborate and Transform” Every solution designed at ICT Health is aimed at creating a differentiating factor towards their customers/partners in terms of the quality of service and the engaged patient experience. It helps them build a sustainable competitive advantage in the market by addressing the constantly changing regulatory environment, growing patient needs, increasing business complexity and evolving technologies.

Additionally, their clients are benefited immensely from the granular visibility of their operations including revenue and costing analysis. Moreover ICT Health also provides increased patient convenience leading to higher levels of patient engagement and also helps the hospital achieve and maintain accreditations like NABH. In its very essence, ICT Health looks at its clients like partners in the healthcare ecosystem.

“We believe that benefits are not just realized by our clients, we as a vendor organization also benefit from them in terms of keeping the product and technologies current and up-todate,” says Gautam.

Turning Challenges into Opportunities The biggest challenge ICT Health has faced as an e-health solution provider is that the clients expected them to provide a solution which had the next-gen technological architecture but exactly mimic the exiting processes, which in most cases was not in line with the patient's expectations.

ICT Health accredits its success primarily to their accurate interpretation of the industry and technology trends. They are pioneers in creating cloud native technology and today, their customers are able to leverage cloud, social media and analytics to achieve a very high level of operating efficiency along with strong patient engagement.

Upcoming Endeavors ICT Health is focused on leveraging digital health communities to empower collaboration and e-commerce.

Their upcoming products are designed to take healthcare beyond the hospital boundaries into home healthcare and building the ecosystem of a digital health community.

Gautam strongly believes that blockchain will take over the world of healthcare. They are already working on the next generation of the platforms which incorporates blockchain technology into the technology stack.

ICT Health has a strong academic partnership with top colleges in India which allows them to receive suggestions and ideas from a dynamic student community that are not burdened by constraints and are more comfortable with exploring the latest technologies like machine learning, IoT and blockchain.

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Company Name

Management

Brief

Curofy www.curofy.com

Pawan Gupta Nipun Goyal Mudit Vijayvergiya, Co-founders

Developed with an objective to bridge distance among doctors and help them collaborate to solve the cases, Curofy offers doctors a spam-free and secure environment to communicate with each other.

Drlive Private Ltd www.drlive.in

Chethan Channakeshava Co-founder

DrLive is a healthcare platform to implement telemedicine programs on mobile devices. The highly secure platform is very easy to use and has proven its value in a variety of healthcare specialties and settings for patient follow ups, second opinions and primary healthcare.

eKincare Pvt Ltd www.ekincare.com

Kiran Kalakuntla Founder & CEO

eKincare is a wellness platform that integrates medical records, healthcare services and leverages predictive analytics to design wellness initiatives & reduce healthcare costs.

Manan Mahajan CEO

Hospytek is a solution that enhances and manages medical device/equipment business by identifying veritable need to fulfilling it through a suitable suppliers and much more, all under a single platform.

Hospytek www.hospytek.com

Gautam Dey MD & CEO

ICT Health is a dynamic care delivery organization looking to empower their care practices & operations with smarter technology accelerators that directly enable improved outcomes.

1 mg www.1mg.com

Prashant Tandon Co-founder

1 mg is an e-commerce healthcare company that operates an online marketplace for medicines and facilitates medical appointments and diagnostic test bookings.

InnAccel www.innaccel.com

Siraj Dhanani Founder & CEO

InnAccel has created India’s first MedTech innovation platform, anchored by state-of-the-art R&D facilities and a network of national and global partners, to drive such innovation, and transform healthcare globally.

Medimojo www.medimojo.in

Shikha Suman Founder & CEO

Medimojo is build with an interoperable platform to aggregate healthcare data from disparate sources which helps turn health data into insights that patients and healthcare professionals can use to make smarter and healthier decisions.

Navia Life Care www.navialifecare.com

Kunal Kishore Dhawan Co-founder & CEO Gaurav Gupta Co-founder & COO Shourjo Banerjee Co-founder & CTO

Navia Life Care is a health technology company focusing on patient care and enabling users to manage their health with simplicity.

PurpleDocs www.purpledocs.com

Deepak Gupta Founder & CEO

PurpleDocs is an innovative cloud based offering that makes it easy for healthcare providers to instantly access healthcare information anytime, anywhere.

ICT Health www.icthealth.com

Manasije Mishra Managing Director

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December 2017

Interview with Insights Success

Indian Health Organisation: Introducing the new Advancement of Telemedicine in the Arena of e-Healthcare

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ealth sector are now actively building upon their national foundations for e-Health to deliver public health and health services in a more strategic and integrated manner. e-Health can reduce health inequalities and help to modernize national health information systems and services. It has become a key asset for accessing health information and services, as well as improving how health information is gathered, managed and used. The prevalence of e-Health is growing in India and many programmers are maturing into established national services, indicating Member States’ commitment to e-Health organization.

Keeping the inclusive advanced eHealthcare solution industry in the mind, Indian Health Organisation (IHO), a premier, innovative company, delivers ‘vHealth by Aetna’, and an end-to-end primary care service towards their clients. Moreover, the organization has introduced benefits of telemedicine in the arena of eHealthcare sector.

In an interview with Insights Success, Manasije Mishra, Managing Director of the Indian Health Organisation gave some insightful answers highlighting the influence of smart technologies which help industries to invent diverse ways of advance supports and solutions in the field of e-Healthcare.

December 2017

1) Kindly brief us about your company and share what kind of eHealthcare Solutions and services Indian Health Organization provides?

Indian Health Organization is one of India’s leading primary healthcare companies. It is a 100% subsidiary of Aetna, a Fortune 100 world leader in providing healthcare benefits. Focused on making quality healthcare accessible in India, IHO offers ‘vHealth by Aetna’, and an end-to-end primary care service. At its heart are IHO's own doctors based in a state of the art telemedicine center. They are supported by 16,500 clinicians in its medical partner network which includes dentists, diagnostic centers, specialist doctors, medical centers, hospitals & pharmacies. With this ecosystem, IHO organizes blood tests and medicine delivery at patient's residence and refer them to appropriate specialists for consultation in their vicinity at a discounted fee. ‘vHealth by Aetna’, in clinical partnership with a Swiss market leader, Medgate A.G, brings telemedicine trained doctors close to masses without compromising on quality. For any health problem, be it a chronic disease or ailment, vHealth’s in-house doctors can be reached through a toll-free number or through its newly launched mobile app for voice and video consultation.

1. Doctors, on an average, spend 20 to 30 minutes on each consultation to understand the patients complete medical, surgical & social history.

2. Use established clinical protocols for probing patients with relevant questions, ask them to perform physical maneuvers or send photographs to identify the root cause of the medical problems.

3. Treat by sending a prescription, a detailed care plan and conduct regular follow-up to provide proper guidance and ensure that the treatment helps the patient.

4. Arrange home diagnostic tests, medicine delivery, home care treatment and specialist appointments at reputed health centers with help from a network of 16,500 health partners.

IHO has almost a million active members.

2) Briefly tell us about the CEO/ of the company.

Manasije Mishra is the Managing Director of the Indian Health Organisation, since 2015. In this role, he is responsible for establishing IHO as the preferred primary care provider to millions. Since taking over the role, Mishra has successfully transformed Indian Health Organization (IHO) from a startup to a rapidly growing, customer-centric organization.

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Interview with Insights Success

Previously, Manasije was the Chief Executive Officer of Max Bupa. Under his leadership, Max Bupa witnessed exceptional growth, making it the fastest growing health insurer. Prior to this, he had a two-decade career with HSBC. He served as the Managing Director of HSBC Invest Direct and held senior positions in Strategy, Retail Banking, Operations, E-commerce, Trade Finance, Treasury and Financial Control.

Manasije is an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, UK. He is an Economics graduate from Delhi University and an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur.

3) What are the challenges your company has faced on the road to success?

Our biggest challenge is to change behavior. Consumers tend to ignore symptoms initially and try to selfmedicate. After the things get serious, they directly seek a specialist. Most of us do not regularly consult a family or primary care doctor. This behavior leads to higher costs and poor health outcomes. IHO is tackling this with the launch of vHealth by Aetna. Today 40% of our patients are repeat customers. Patients realise effective consultations can happen over the phone or video. The post-consultation rating of our doctors is at 4.5 out of 5.

4) What are the benefits gained by your clients while doing business with you?

Our team of doctors completed over 15,000 consults since its launch in May 2017 and we are delighted with the patient feedback. Our doctors at vHealth were able to provide the appropriate diagnosis and treatment for 70% of the patients without referring them for physical interventions.

Several patients have commented that

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we have been able to identify the root cause of their long-standing medical problems. Apart from managing acute and chronic patients, we have helped to diagnose cases of hemochromatosis (iron overload), gastric cancer, triple vessel disease, nephrology, Parkinsonplus and more.

Patients were also delighted that they were able to get the undivided attention of the doctor for over 30 minutes and with our hand-holding and follow-ups consultation.

5) What would be your words of advice for the upcoming entrepreneurs?

Behind any innovative solution is a consumer problem and a strong belief that this can be solved. Being a successful entrepreneur involves a series of missteps and mistakes, in seeking the right, commercially viable solution. Don’t hesitate to experiment and fail. Entrepreneurs, who disrupt the market, are driven by passion and self-belief. They will fail fast until they hit on the solution.

6) Brief us about some of the highly acclaimed and widely accepted innovations of Indian Health Organization?

66% of the medical expenses are related to consultations, diagnostic tests, medicines and other nonhospitalization expenses. IHO launched Classic Consultation membership, designed to meet the dayto-day outpatient medical expenses.

The membership is priced at Rs.5880 for one year for a family of four and helps people save upto 50% on their health expenses. Since its launch in Oct 2016, IHO has enrolled over 1.5lakh members for this consultation.

members get unlimited teleconsultation for their family members. Members can avail free specialist consultation at top hospitals. The package also offers 2 FREE comprehensive health checkups, 2 FREE dental scaling and cleaning sittings and discounts on other day-to-day medical expenses like diagnostic tests and medicine delivery.

This membership also helps its customers benefit from Tax exemption under section 80D. 7) Kindly share your views on the current industry trends?

The neglect of primary care in India is one of the reasons for the increasing disease burden and medical costs. Ehealthcare has the potential to make quality healthcare accessible and improve the quality of primary health care.

In the next few decades, the idea of driving to a doctor’s clinic, waiting and physically meeting the doctor will be obsolete. Technology, including smartphones, remote sensors, connected devices, will provide access to digital primary care services. While technology can simplify access to the primary healthcare system, a critical component for success in India will be the delivery of quality care. Clinical expertise clubbed with digital technology is the game changer.

8) What can we expect from Indian Health Organization in the future?

We see a great future for the digital healthcare ecosystem in India. During 2018 we expect many more families to accept vHealth by Aetna as their first port of call for any healthcare issue. By 2020, we aim to have 4 million members.

The annual benefits of Classic Consultation membership include access to vHealth by Aetna, where

December 2017

Curofy:

Doctor's Appealing Platform

‘‘

Collaborating and

communicating doctors on one platform and help diagnose faster and better

‘‘ 20

Pawan Gupta

Nipun Goyal

Mudit Vijayvergiya

Co-founder

Co-founder

Co-founder

S

ocial media serves to connect people with their loved ones and at the same time keeps them informed as well. However, current social media platforms do not connect specialists professionals such as doctors to exhibit and benefit from their expertise. Imagine the power of social media being harnessed for the greater knowledge and sharing expertise which would help doctors to cater their patients in an innovative and revolutionary way. The makings of such a great social media platform are already here. An overwhelming 92% of doctors believe that social media is a great tool to communicate with friends and colleagues.

with their peers and keeping themselves updated with the latest and best medical breakthroughs. Curofy aims to solve the healthcare problems by bringing the most important stakeholders of the industry, i.e. the doctors under single roof. On the surface, Curofy is a social network. It is a facebook-esque mobile application with only doctors as the users. It is trying to bridge the gaping doctorpatient ratio by building the community. This is a boon for not only the industry but also patients all around the country.

Curofy is the largest community of verified doctors in the country. It is trying to build a community of doctors to facilitate seamless communications.

This allows them to continue their medical education by collaborating

With the aim to create a huge supply of “digital doctors”, Co-founders Pawan Gupta, Nipun Goyal, and Mudit Vijayvergiya come from diverse backgrounds. With an acute fascination towards technology and machines,

Provenance of Digital Healthcare Possessors

December 2017

CUROFY Diagnose and cure faster

Pawan did his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi. He worked with Deutsche Bank for 2 years in Mumbai and now leads the Product and Technology teams at Curofy. Nipun Goyal, a B.Tech from IIT Delhi with major in Electrical Engineering and minor in Business Management has worked with Rothschild India where he handled mergers and acquisitions across various business services industries including IT, logistics, transportation etc. He is passionate about making digital health communication easier and likes to interact with various healthcare stakeholders. Mudit is a dual degree graduate in chemical engineering from IIT Delhi and Axtira Inc. on health informatics and analytics for an year before starting Curofy. He has been an ardent speaker at various leading summits. The major ones include VC circle healthcare investment summit-2015, annual conference of family physicians 2015 and Indian Association of Dermatologists, Venerologists and Leprologists 2014. Born and brought up in a family of doctors and an engineer by himself, he could see the inefficiencies that exist in the everyday life of a doctor owing to absence of a simplified technology product which can help them in their professional and academic life.

Coordinating and Connecting Doctors Curofy is a medical case discussion platform for doctors. It is now the largest social network of over 2,20,000 verified doctors in India. Doctors are

December 2017

discussing patient cases with their peers to provide extremely quick and better diagnosis to their patients. The platform is satisfying the hunger for knowledge and results in better outcomes of the doctors. With doctor to patient ratio being 1:1700 being extremely low in India, Curofy aims to bridge this gap with the help of technology. Curofy envisions that giving doctors a platform to coordinate and collaborate will help solve many cases and save lives thus, making India a safer place to live in.

The platform allows medical suppliers notify relevant doctors about new medical drug samples, device demos, webinars, events, and surveys. The company generates revenue through medical suppliers by connecting content-based leads to target doctors.

Curofy has received a pre-Series. A round of funding led by US-based VC firm RoundGlass Partners and other angel investors.

To ensure the platform remains spam free, the team makes sure that only relevant content is pushed to doctors.

Less a social network, and more a learning and collaboration platform, helps physicians to stay ahead by interacting with and learning from experts and peers. With Curofy, doctors can easily find other doctors, call them with a single tap, and connect to collaborate on patient cases.

their Google Launchpad initiative.

With daily interactions between doctors (more than 250,000 cases already), it has prepared disease trends reports, social listening tools, various statistics that can help the industry make a more informed decision.

Curofy has won several accolades for innovations including getting international recognition VivaTech Paris (“Next generation learning tools for HCPs”) and Google LaunchPad (San Fransisco), Medtech Investing (London). It has also been featured as one of the top 5 android apps for doctors by TOI. Working Towards a Bright Future According to experts, in the healthcare industry, which is projected to reach $280 billion by 2020, the scope of digital marketing is increasing enormously. Amidst such projections, doctor-centric healthcare platforms are also riding the changing trends in India. According to the platform, it aims to keep improving its core offering for doctors and help them in all aspects of their practice, including knowledge, reputation, finance, and resources. Curofy plans to conquer the Indian market first before going on to other markets. It has already started running pilots in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Nigeria. It plans to have 1 million doctors on the app in the next two years.

Widely Accepted Innovations Curofy has been recognized by Google and is among few chosen startup for

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Upcoming Developments

l ckchain: A Cure for Healthcare IT Problems

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lockchain is one of the most significant technologies since the internet. Government and states, locally and globally, have started to explore the Blockchain technology for rationalizing back-office paper trails and business operations. It has been at the center of media attention largely due to Bitcoin, an upcoming digital currency that uses blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology is particularly helpful to streamline processes, minimize fraud, lower operational costs, eliminate duplication of work and generate new ways to integrate in a sharing-based economy.

Simply put, blockchain is a distributed, absolute ledger or database that stores records known as blocks, which further stores various kinds of information. These blocks, which collectively form a “blockchain,” are stored on various

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storage devices, which ensure that no single person or entity can manipulate the ledger or database without everyone else knowing.

While blockchain is being considered for many uses, its potential to revolutionize healthcare is apparent. Having an open blockchain for medical data can prove useful as most healthcare data is now segregated amongst different providers, who often use different database systems. These systems often have crucial information which is scattered and inaccessible. Such a scenario can prove to be dangerous in an industry where even a few extra seconds or minutes can make a difference. Blockchain systems built for healthcare can make important healthcare-related data more easily accessible leading to a better and faster treatment.

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Blockchain can link patients to their data, rather than to their identity. According to a recent survey, the healthcare industry is planning most aggressive deployments of blockchain, with 35 percent of health and life sciences planning to deploy it in the coming years. Furthermore, blockchain verification can help increase the trust and integrity in clinical research publication. The decentralized ledger allows for a simpler, more efficient and cheaper way to share peer-reviewed research and is highly applauded by clinicians.

Let’s look at some of the ways in which blockchain is transforming healthcare: Drug and Organ Traceability Currently, counterfeit drugs cost pharmaceutical companies an estimated $200 billion in losses annually. Employing blockchain will enable every transaction between drugs manufactures, pharmacists, wholesalers, and patients to be tracked to verify and secure drug product information which is important for tackling issues like counterfeit drugs.

It also facilitates new drug development by making patient results more widely accessible.

Blockchain-based systems could help drive unique collaboration between participants and researchers to promote innovation within medical research, predominantly in the fields of precision or personalized medicine.

Patient Data Access Informed patients know that data is critical in increasing their care and safety. This safety is beyond the data hacks.

Blockchain provides ability for the healthcare providers to have access to information that will help them better treat the patient. There has been an inclination towards educating patients to manage their health and embrace wellness and prevention and that may also include the data that is generated out of this practice. Precision medicine in clinical trials presents another big opportunity for blockchain innovations.

Medical Research

Moreover, it also provides a platform for tracking blood and human organs. These products are critical to human health and they often have a tight time expiry. Blockchain helps in safely tracking it each step of the way.

Centralizing the results of clinical trials and patient outcomes for new treatment protocols can improve care and patient outcomes. Scientists can quickly find and enroll patients for their clinical studies and even complete their entire research project using online datasets. Researchers can cumulate research data across all the clinical trials a person has completed to gain unique insight which was not possible with a smaller dataset. Thus, blockchain could provide the access to make medical innovations quicker.

Precision Medicine

Claims and Billing Management

The lack of interoperability among data systems in a personal health network is impairment on patient care.

Employing blockchain could reduce admin costs for billing by eliminating the need for intermediaries with automated

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activities and more efďŹ cient processing. This could help minimize medical frauds which can cause more than $30 million losses in a year.

Contribution of Wearables Wearables and internet of things devices can also be integrated into the health IT ecosystem through blockchain.

Health wearables are currently storing critical information for clinical research, outcomes of treatments, and disease prevention and management. If validated, this data can be secured, shared and veriďŹ ed on a blockchain and thus the function of health wearable will take on a whole new role.

Electronic Health Records Blockchain can help enhance three major features of the EHR systems: Immutability via File Integrity: Each event on the blockchain has a unique combination corresponding to the contents of a record. This means that the users can verify if the status of the content of the records has been changed or not.

Cybersecurity via Data Access Management: Each combination may contain particular user permissions for doctors, patients, nurses or any authorized users or devices.

Therefore, only authorized personnel may access record information.

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Interoperability via Collaborative Vision Control: Each party has a record linked to the original record that is registered to the blockchain. Thus, everyone who has the appropriate role and responsibility can add information to the record while avoiding issues such as inconsistent or duplicate records.

Data Security With the growth of connected devices and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), existing health IT architecture is struggling to keep systems secure. Blockchain technology has the potential to be the infrastructure that is needed to keep health data private and secure while reaping the beneďŹ ts of connected medical devices.

There are some incredibly exciting ways in which blockchain can enhance healthcare operations, however, more research, trials and experiments must be carried out to ensure a secure and established system is implanted before using blockchain technology on a large scale in healthcare.

Today, the healthcare industry is drowning in data- clinical trials, patient medical records, complex billing, medical research and more. Adoption and implementation of blockchain will be an evolution over time as blockchain applications are vetted and adopted as well as the industry coming together to determine collaboration and governance issues.

December 2017

Navia Life Care

Leveraging Innovative Technologies to Build Customized Solutions for Patient Engagement

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We aim to

provide simple tools

enabling better management of a person’s health in the most convenient way

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Gaurav Gupta

Kunal Kishore Dhawan

Shourjo Banerjee

Co-founder & COO

Co-founder & CEO

Co-founder & CTO

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urrently, the healthcare sector is in a very good space in terms of development, specifically looking at digitization and adoption of technology by patients and providers alike. In today’s world of growing and ageing population, information and communication technologies plays a crucial role in the provision and delivery of healthcare. In terms of patient care, e-health technologies enable remote patient monitoring, better dissemination of information to patients, improved access to health advice, access to remote consultation and telemedicine and quicker access to emergency services. Healthcare providers are eager to try out innovative tech-based solutions to engage with their patients, but at the same time there is a pressure of pricing, competition and differentiation. There are several reports that showcase the growth of the Indian healthcare market in the coming years, and technology will be a key component in realizing this potential.

E-health technologies also help to deliver better training for healthcare workers, thus improving disease surveillance, data collection and the management of patient records, thereby increasing transparency and accountability. Leveraging these technological advancements, Navia Life Care, a health technology company, is building customized solutions for patient engagement.

Navia Life Care works with medical providers, including, but not limited to doctors, clinics, hospitals, medical centers, and even pharmaceutical companies. Their focus is on developing innovative solutions that directly impact patient health outcomes through the areas of patient compliance, monitoring, communication, and engagement.

Its solution suite consists of clinic management systems, patient engagement platforms, and providerand patient-facing mobile applications,

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all targeted to improve the relationship between patient and provider.

The Pillars of Navia Life Care Kunal Kishore Dhawan, Gaurav Gupta and Shourjo Banerjee are the Founders of Navia Life Care.

Together they initiated the company with an aim to improve the lives of people through innovative products and services.

Kunal holds a Graduation and PostGraduation in the fields of Life Sciences and Business Management from University of Delhi and Carnegie Mellon University, respectively. He has worked in the healthcare and life sciences industry for the last 8 years.

Gaurav is a MBA from Indian School of Business and a Biotech Engineer from NSIT, Delhi. He has an extensive experience in running clean-tech, chemical and social impact businesses, and specializes in Strategy, Business Development and Marketing.

Shourjo is a Computer Science Engineer from University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, after which he gained experience in Software engineering at Freescale Semiconductors. He is passionate about technology and even has a patent on network architecture to his name.

Collectively they intend to provide simple tools enabling better management of a person’s health in the most convenient way.

A Rousing Expedition “The biggest challenge that any startup faces is to generate revenue, i.e. the ability to attract paying customers. As

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a new company, credibility is often lacking, so most companies resort to giving their service or product for free, which anchors the customer further,” shares Kunal.

Additionally, finding and retaining good talent was also a huge challenge Navia Life Care faced. Fortunately, most of their core team was stuck with them for over a year, and helped them build the complete product, but attracting them to the company and further incentivizing them to stay, was a mammoth task. Every startup, if done properly, struggles with finances. And as a Founder, Kunal had to put in his personal savings and run the business until an external financer pitched in.

While working with medical providers, Navia Life Care understood the key problems faced by them in their functioning, and attempted to solve them using technology. Their key focus areas are improvement in health outcomes, increasing patient compliance, enable monitoring, and management of patient health records amongst others. By implementing their solutions, medical providers can gain patient loyalty, improve brand recognition, enhance quality of care and all in all, add to their revenues.

“Entrepreneurship is a hard journey, sometimes lonely, and full of ups and downs,” says Kunal. Thus, he advises the aspiring entrepreneurs to be prepared for such circumstances. If they are in it for the labels or think of it as a “get-rich-quick” scheme, then they are in for a rude shock. Grit, perseverance, and determination, along with the willingness to accept mistakes and be adaptable are the key lessons to be learnt.

Distinctive Offerings Navia Life Care prides itself for working towards solving the problems that are faced by patients and providers alike, through innovative use of technology. They have a product suite, with different offerings for different kinds of clients.

For doctors and clinics, they have two offerings; Navia Ace and Navia Ace Plus. Navia Ace is an end-to-end clinic management and patient engagement software that connects to a patientfacing mobile application. Some of the key USPs of this includes a fullyintegrated web-based CMS, a timeline feature that helps doctors to visualize and gauge the patient’s progress, linkage to patient compliance trends, analytics and much more. More importantly, it is the most affordable CMS currently in the market. In Navia Ace Plus, providers also receive a white-labeled app for their practice which they can give to their patients and have a direct touch point with them at all times. Their offering for hospitals is Navia Pro, a highly customizable and flexible patient engagement platform, which is whitelabeled, and tailor-made to fit the needs of the provider.

Upcoming Ventures Navia Life Care is continuously working on improving their offerings for both patients and providers. Some of their interesting upcoming projects include specialty-driven product platforms, A.I. powered analytics and recommendation engine for doctors and hospitals, smart prescriptions and much more.

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Computer Technology Transforming Healthcare About the Author

Arpit Paliwal Founder HRS Navigation

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With more than 10 years of cumulative experience in surgical navigation system R&D, clinical and marketing & sales, Arpit Paliwal is the challenge loving Founder of HRS Navigation, who has done executive program in sales & marketing from IIM Calcutta. He was managing the navigation business for all India as part of the Stryker (Fortune 500), where they were already developing the navigation system back in 2007. It was during his tenure that he came across various hospitals for computer assisted surgeries & realized the need for simple, affordable navigation solution. Arpit has also been awarded with the Annual Product Performance Award for navigation and for bringing around the navigation business in India.

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Insider’s Opinion

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omputer Assisted Surgery aims to improve patient care by the utilization of computer based technologies during the procedure; to amplify the benefits; to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers and physicians in developing new concepts and applications. The scope of Computer Assisted Surgery encompasses all major fields within surgery, as well as biomedical imaging and instrumentation, and digital technology employed as a supplement to imaging in diagnosis, therapeutics, and surgery.

Surgical Precision Surgery is a distressing experience at best. Medical robotics and CAS (Computer Assisted Surgery) helps alleviate the problem. They have been used in a wide variety of fields from head and neck to urologic surgery. They provide greater reach and flexibility, smaller incisions made with more precision which is enough to access the targeted anatomy. This results in more accurate pre-operative planning, reduction of operating time, avoiding damage to healthy tissues, exact alignment of surgical instruments with anatomy and faster patient recovery. It’s an established fact about the benefit of these technologies & ever increasing uses support the fact.

Revolution In recent years there has been a definite shift to the use of minimally-invasive techniques, performed by steering surgical tools through small incisions in the patient’s skin in order to minimize blood loss and soft tissue damage, and consequently, reduce postoperative pain and recovery time.

There are CAS technologies which work on CT/MRI images of patient to guide in real time. These are used mostly in Brain, ENT & Spine surgeries. Some CAS technologies which uses ultrasound are being used in soft tissue biopsies for liver, lungs & breasts. Also there are technologies which are image-less. These are used in Knee, Hip implants surgeries.

These technologies made the complex surgeries safer & less pain full. Now for e.g. in brain surgeries surgeons can plan the surgery on computer generated 3D model of the patient by marking areas of interest & danger areas. During surgery system then guides the surgeon to reach area of interest & alerting the surgeon if he is operating near any danger region. It gives confidence to the surgeon on more aggressive on the tumor & still gentle to any critical part of December 2017

the brain following the shortest and safest path. Medical robots are also getting developed to perform various part of brain surgery to take the brain surgery to next dimension.

Similarly in the spine surgery the misplacement of spine screw is quite common. Misplaced screw can cause permanent damage to nervous system. With the help of CAS rate of misplacement has been significantly reduced make it safer for the patients. Various standard reviews have bespoken the superiority of CAS technique compared to others for pedicle screw placement. Accuracy rates of around 95% are commonly reported with CAS which is quite high when compared to free-hand techniques. Also it helps to reduce the harmful X-ray radiation dosage for operating team and the patient.

Robotic surgeries are growing at very rapid rate. Robots are performing surgeries which require dexterity which can't be achieved by human hand. They have tiny wristed instruments which can bend and rotate more than the human hands providing greater reach through smaller incision.

Augment Reality The recent emerging role and integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in healthcare is transforming this data rich field and justify consideration for future applications to enhance the surgical experience.

For e.g. a new technology which augments X-ray vision on the real patient anatomy to help surgeon plan and execute the operation effectively. It’s like a superman viewing through the skin of patient.

Growing Market The world-wide robotic surgery & CAS market is expected to reach USD 20.8 billion by 2024 as per a market research, report. The ubiquity of chronic disorders around the globe is on a rise. These diseases hence need surgery for the treatment solution. CAS & Robotic surgeries for these cases provides minimally invasive approach, fewer complications, faster recovery, lower pain and blood loss, thereby propelling the demand over the forecast period.

Computer assisted technologies are rising & becoming standard of care. Lot of innovations are happening. Future looks promising once these technologies reaches to masses & make everyone benefitted from them.

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Tech Evolution

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December 2017

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n the individuals with the major depressive disorder, a neurophysiological change that emphasizes the actions, feelings, and thoughts associated with bodily events such as the firing of nerve cells in the brain or the release of hormones often alter motor control. Thus, this affects the mechanisms of controlling speech production and facial expression.

These fluctuations are related to psychomotor retardation, a condition marked by slowed neuromotor output that is behaviorally manifested as altered coordination and timing across multiple motor-based properties.

Vocal-biomarkers is a technique that enables machines to understand human emotions by analyzing, recording and detecting raw voice intonations as people speak.

Biomarkers in the voice of a person have been linked to disorders such as depression, coronary artery disease, and anxiety.

By decoding the human vocal intonations into their underlying emotions in real-time, this technology enables the applications and solutions, voice-powered devices to interact at the emotional level, just as humans do. This platform is designed to generate unprecedented persistent and passive health awareness to enable and enhance holistic patient management. It measures the features of speech but does not require the contents of the speech, therefore protecting privacy.

Vocal biomarkers are tools that use voice-input to give a clear insight into a person’s health conditions. It allows non-invasive, effective and fast diagnosis unlike blood tests, MRI/CTscans, to detect serious conditions.

Various aspects of a person’s voice

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can help analyze the mental and physical well-being of the person.

This tool has tremendous potential to turnaround diagnostic-procedures in terms of speed, accuracy and costeffectiveness. Moreover, the voicebased diagnosis does not expose patients to radiations and therefore are safe in all other perspectives.

Self-diagnosis is an app away The emergence of vocal-test applications on smartphones or other voice-enabled devices as a low-cost screening option helps to identify people with heart diseases and other disorders. These user-friendly applications will enhance the possibility of self-diagnosis and help patients and their kin to know potential health risks in advance.

To understand the dimensions of emotions in human communications, i.e., people’s moods, attitudes, and emotional characteristics – also known as personalities this technology allows devices and applications to understand not just what we type, click, say, or touch, but what we mean and how we feel.

Speech as a Biomarker A neurological disorder leaves a fingerprint in voice and speech production. Speech signal analysis can deliver clinical information that can be used to foresee certain diseases, provide information about the neurological position of specific diseases, and assess to disease progression or the effectiveness of treatment regimens. The most common method to assess the motor speech characteristics associated with neurological disease diagnosis is the auditory perceptual method. This

involves a professional hearing and analyzing the motor speech changes associated with neurological disorders processes for clinical assessment, judgments, and decisions regarding the functional change. There is a need for a fully automated assessment system that can organize, process, collect, and analyze speech from individuals with concussions and deliver meaningful insights about the effects on speech production.

Once an audio recording has been processed, the next step is to extract various acoustic features that will form the basis of the health diagnostics tool. Speech can be characterized by a variety of different features and these features can be determined for various linguistic elements such as phonemes, vowels, words, or even entire sentences.

Time measurements such as average and standard deviation of the duration of a linguistic entity, duration of pauses, etc., can be measured. To measures how quickly an individual can accurately produce a series of rapid, alternating sounds assessment, tool like Diadochokinetic rate comes in action. It is an assessment tool for assessing oral motor skills.

If the individual is experiencing speech or language problems, speechlanguage pathologists may measure DDK rate by asking to repeat certain sounds during a timed test. The results can help the pathologists to evaluate the severity of speech or language problems, diagnose the underlying cause, and prescribe apt treatment.

Efficiency and Accuracy The examination of the motor speech system can provide information about

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the integrity of the neurological system. The more complex the words; higher is the likelihood of errors and variations in speaking of those words. At the same time, the selected words and phrases while speaking have been chosen, because they require the involvement of different parts of the mouth, tongue, and soft palate in the back of the throat as they contain two or more different syllables.

The accuracy of speech analysis (recognition, word onset detection, vocal feature extraction, etc.) degrades severely when speech is recorded in adverse acoustical environments. While building a speech-based diagnostic tool, the basic concern is the inability to extract the desired vocal features, signiďŹ cant errors in the vocal features, and inaccuracies in the detection of the boundaries of words and phonemes.

Many other types of data such as, speech collection, processing, and analysis pose various unique challenges that require careful design choices and evaluations to ensure that data collection will provide recordings of the highest quality possible. While speech has received an increasing amount of attention analyzes, remain to be done to validate its potential as biomarker and assessment tool. The focus in prior work has been on demonstrating the relationships between neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative conditions and various vocal features.

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December 2017

Impact and Importance

Digital Revolution Transforming Healthcare Industry

About the Author

Milind Pol

Sr. Vice President Ohum Healthcare Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

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Milind Pol is the Sr. Vice President of Ohum Healthcare Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a clinical transformation company o ering world class products and processes to improve patient safety, clinical outcomes, and lower costs. As a BTech from IIT Bombay, Milind is an e ective analyst, problem solver and communicator.

December 2017

shows potential relation between structure of genes, and physical & emotional health of an individual. Patients have started hile the world is talking worrying about why and how they about technology have been victims of a particular health enhancements and AI and issue. Especially with respect to mission to Mars, healthcare sector is lifestyle diseases, they demand cause evolving rapidly to redefine itself. Very and effect to be mapped in a scientific soon the changes will dwarf the other manner at least going back to their sectors in terms of impact and genome sequence. importance to human history. This article talks about digital revolution Major trend setting forces here are Big that will transform the healthcare Data and AI. With end-to-end EMR landscape globally. and genomic data of millions of patients available like never before, Prescriptive and reactive care to technology can start clustering and Predictive and proactive care categorizing populations based on Traditionally, medicine in healthcare genomic sequences, habits like has been mostly treatment based for an smoking, family history, and much ailment. External factors like bacteria more. This then can be linked to early or virus impact health of an individual warning signs and symptoms, reactions and medicine is expected to help to specific treatment protocols, health human body fight these external outcomes and most importantly, risk of enemies. Medicine of today starts getting into a specific health condition when a patient, who is unwell, like Cancer or Diabetes. approaches a clinical expert to help fight against his health problems.

Predictive sciences take it one step forward with deep learning algorithms This is very counterintuitive in cases of that not only predict “what” but also cancer, diabetes, hypertension etc., predict “when”. Today, these which do not have any known external innovative technologies are being influencers. Research on genomics deployed on a pilot basis and very soon

W

December 2017

we will see these getting into the mainstream.

As per a research study, age adjusted admission rates for all-cause hospitalisation were 631.3 and 454.8 per 1,000 participant years and the mean length of stay was 8.2 and 7.1 days respectively for participants with and without diabetes. When we are able to have effective predictive and preventive methods, can we focus on these high risk patients?

The paradigm changes here from treating a patient (when he presents himself with a complaint) to helping a global citizen live a healthy life by not being a patient. In tomorrow’s world, no global citizen is going to experience the typical symptoms. Even before those symptoms come to the surface, the risk will be mitigated. This is just like destroying a plot of terrorist attack!

Episodic Cost management to Reduce number of incidents to manage costs The biggest challenge for any public or private healthcare organisation is reducing costs of healthcare and making it more and more affordable.

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While the machinery is working on reducing cost of generic medications, we really want adequate money to be spent and intelligent minds to be working on best of innovations in health and be able to compensate them for their best of efforts. Now this gets you into catch 22 with debate on how much profit you really want them to be able to make.

Needed to Treat) to a perfect score of 1. This will eliminate discussion on side effects of the treatment.

Registries for reporting to making use of registries for effective I strongly believe that the above management of conditions argument is coming to an end. The way In the past, a lot of data was being Moors law worked on hardware, in captured by various government and healthcare the targeted therapies and other organizations to understand predictive and proactive approaches criticality and severity of a particular are going to reduce the number of disease. While it helped us to target incidents by more than 80%. This huge treatments like Polio in the past, reduction will make way for money to technology has now already started be spent in the most critical areas of moving to the next logical step. healthcare.

You don’t need connected hospital In the US, CMS has already started systems anymore to be able to identify working on outreach programs to outbreaks. Google has proven it in the reduce hospitalization of comorbid last few outbreaks already, by patients. Programs like these are providing just the search terms in getting acceptance in developed search engine to predict with high countries through effective control on accuracy for effective management of payer side. Today, a lot of health those outbreaks. insurance providers are giving special discounts on gym membership and Can we take disease registries to the other preventive health measures. next level to add not only clinically relevant data but also twitter tweets, While the number of incidents is facebook updates and whatsapp private getting reduced, Big Data is going to chats, etc.? Can we profile registries by play a huge role to take NNT (Number genomic markers?

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Can we make all the registries open to researchers to be able to do meaningful research? Can the exceptional cases with positive outcomes across the globe be analyzed to get effective treatment protocols which are evidence based, not in a clinical trial, but in real life cases.

Large Health facilities to Home based tele-health Health systems evolved with necessity of creating best infrastructure to get best diagnostic services, and then best of healthcare. Currently, the large facilities can afford best of technology with accurate monitoring capabilities and speedy treatment.

Very soon the wearable technology is going to be ubiquitous and highly accurate with support from required deep learning algorithm. This, linked with efficient response system from health worker on tele-health platform, will take away need for patients to present themselves in hospitals. Robots are already making their way in telehealth.

This single change is not only going to improve efficiency of the whole healthcare delivery system but will also be highly beneficial to the patient community.

December 2017

HOSPITAL Making Healthcare Smarter

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i-Fi is the foundation for digital transformation in the healthcare industry. The Wi-Fi based healthcare service sector is predicted to reach a whopping $33.6 billion by 2020 globally. Healthcare industry has changed significantly in accordance with the technological advancements, including its relationship with Wi-Fi. The demand for Wi-Fi technology is rapidly increasing as doctors, nurses and other medical professionals increasingly use Wi-Fi-enabled devices, ranging from smartphones to patient monitors, in their daily responsibilities. Wi-Fi access helps medical professionals to access real-time information and patient records.

vaccination reminders, repeat prescription information, follow-up appointment dates and special offers to the patients.

Following are some of the ways in which Wi-Fi is transforming healthcare:

Feedback on Services

Efficient Workflow Nearly all healthcare professionals are required to be highly mobile. In a wireless environment, staff is no longer restricted by the wired workstations and can freely move from place to place and task to task without interruptions.

This enables them to monitor patient vital signs through the use of mobile devices that are connected to the hospital network. Incorporating such practices simplifies the internal exchange of data and the recording of health-related patient data.

Furthermore, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) digitally stores all health-related data and can be shared by the doctors across diverse locations like patient rooms, treatments room and even in the operating theatre. The same is true for mobilization of diagnostic equipment. The static devices can be integrated into the hospital network via Wi-Fi to make them mobile and thus reduce the need to purchase multiple devices.

In healthcare sector, where everything is driven by targets and patient satisfaction, it is important to receive meaningful feedback. Useful feedback ensures that all the medical center staff is aware of patient views and can continue to deliver the best service possible. A healthcare center might get feedback information on how easy it was to book an appointment, what patients think of the care they received, and whether they needed a repeat appointment.

Healthcare centers can ask for feedback on services via their Wi-Fi service whilst the patient is waiting for their appointment.

Remote Consultations

Data Transmission Wi-Fi enables transfer of data from and to anywhere in the hospital and that too at a lightning fast speed. Doctors benefit immensely from this as they can access patient information faster and can relay an appropriate cure immediately. Wi-Fi can also be used to deliver highly targeted and patient-specific information such as

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Appointments between doctors and patients with nonemergency conditions can be carried out using video conferencing software. Wi-Fi allows medical professionals in possession of a mobile device to meet their appointment schedule even when they are not physically present on-site.

The benefits of this are wide ranging, from saving valuable practice budget to boosting patient satisfaction.

December 2017

Tech-n-Trends

Medical Advances Wi-Fi is not just useful for the patients. It is also being used for monitoring oxygen devices, smart beds, access to electronic medical records, and real-time access to X-rays and MRI scans. Such connectivity provides the users with anytime-anywhere access and allows clinicians to provide accurate and timely patient monitoring and focus on the best quality of patient care rather than just administrative tasks.

Guest Wi-Fi Enabling guest Wi-Fi for patients and visitors will mean that outpatient wait times can be put to good use, and inpatients can stay connected to friends and family more easily. Healthcare organizations can also update caretakers with the latest information directly to their connected

December 2017

mobile devices, as well as enable services such as selfcheck in, all of which can help to streamline workows while improving patient experience.

Smart Resource Allocation Healthcare professionals, while trying to make the patient experience as smooth as possible remains conscious of the expenses involved in allocating resources. It is of course important to bear the expenses in mind and ensure that services are implemented and used in an effective manner.

In this regard, Wi-Fi technology can be used to track wheelchairs, allowing staff to locate them easily and reducing instances of equipment going missing. Presence analytics can also identify which rooms are being used the most, so the hospital can adjust accordingly.

The possibilities are endless and the future for healthcare providers is a plethora of opportunity for enhanced communication from the provision of Wi-Fi.

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E-Healthcare: Harnessing the Power of Technology About Author Satish Kannan is the Co-founder of DocsApp, a mobile platform where people can consult specialist MD Doctors within 30 minutes through chat or call from the location of their convenience. Satish always had an inclination towards healthcare solutions.

He believes that taking the time to plan the assignment is crucial for the company’s success. Being in the healthcare industry for many years, he has learned its various functions at various levels which include hospitals and hospital management.

He has also extensively worked on importing new equipment from markets around the globe.

I Satish Kannan Co-founder DocsApp

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f there’s one thing we can all agree on, it's that technology has made a huge impact, bringing along with it a plethora of opportunities to explore and take advantage of. It is impressive to see how the youth of this country have adapted to technology in their day-to-day lives. Such has been the advent of technology that we’ve got the older generations trying their hand at it too.

I think one of our biggest advantages is that India is a very young country, filled

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Expert’s Insight with smart minds and enthusiastic individuals who are always striving to make the best of everything given to them. Or “Hustling” as we like to call it. In the past few years, due to the enthusiasm that technology has inspired, we have seen huge behavioral changes in the way we access multiple services. Earlier we used to stand in long queues to pay electricity bills, take time out to walk to the store to shop for necessities, book cabs a day in advance, run to the bank for transactions, and stand in queues to book train tickets. Today, it is a common practice to recharge phones, pay for utilities, order clothes online, make transfers, and all of this using just a smartphone device. 10 years ago if someone would have told, you would a get a cab in 2 minutes by just a few clicks on your phone, it would have been hard to believe. Today, it is an accepted reality; such is the power of technology and this said technology is penetrating into all domains including healthcare. Healthcare is an important domain in which technology is crucial to meet the rising health needs of the country.

but the poor infrastructure and the lack of skilled staff makes it difficult for people to avail these services. A lot more needs to be done and that is where technology can help. Moreover, at the pace at which the country’s population is growing, we would need twice the number of doctors that we have already in order to meet the WHO standard. Startups like DocsApp, are working hard towards making high quality healthcare accessible to the masses.

indicator of the world that we are going to see where patients will primarily access doctor online and meet physically only when absolutely necessary.

For countries like the US and China, healthcare is primarily driven by Insurance companies and the State. On the contrary, in India people have the liberty to choose their preferred medical care because a majority of the population, 85% approximately, pay for their medical consultations right Today, we are a tech savvy generation; out of their own pockets. That being we like to be served quickly, we cannot said, new and innovative ideas will be even wait to think, we just Google it! welcomed as it serves a dual purpose; From going to our mom’s kitchen for a infrastructure costs of offline medical home remedy when we were down care will be brought down drastically with the flu, we’ve evolved to which will make doctors will also be searching for online solutions. able to serve patients beyond any According to statistics, 5% of the geographical limits and consultations Google search keywords are related to will be cost effective. health and medical conditions. There has been a paradigm shift, people are In the future, geographical constraints comfortable with talking to doctors will be a thing of the past. As the online, and it is more convenient for access to high-speed internet is the people to seek virtual help for all increasing, video consultation is health issues and ailments. The becoming seamless and convenient. younger generations in 20-40 age We wouldn’t be surprised if VR brackets are looking online for doctor consultations would become a real consultations, medicine delivery and Anecdotal reports suggest that a thing in the years to come. whopping 700 million people have no getting labs test done at home and the like. access to specialist doctors in India, The changing behavior of the young 80% of the population live in rural populace combined with the strong areas of the country and have minimal The future hospitals as I see will be 70 need for innovative solutions is how % online and 30% offline. People or no access at all to primary we can solve the mammoth healthcare would get their OPD (Outpatient healthcare. The most shocking fact of issues in the country. Online healthcare Department) consultations done easily solutions will be the only and preferred the matter is that 90% of specialist doctors practice in the top cities of the over the mobile and consult the doctor option in the days to come. The country, whereas 90% of the demand is via video chat. At junctures where a internet has democratized multiple from people residing in places outside physical examination is mandatory by industries like travel, music, retail etc. the doctor, they would visit the hospital The impact in healthcare domain is tier 1 and tier 2 cities. There is huge after which they would further follow- truly waiting to unfold in the next 10 mismatch in patient demand and up with the doctor online. Primarily, supply of doctors. years. Better IOT devices for vitals procedures and surgeries would tracking, cloud software, AI helping continue to happen at the offline Even though central and state doctors in diagnosis, are all happening hospitals. What we see at DocsApp governments have initiated various as we speak. DocsApp and other today is that we provide specialist universal healthcare programs, online health solutions are rightly doctor consultation for more than 1500 positioned to transform the future of successful implementation of such patients a day, which is higher than any the Indian healthcare system. schemes is still a distant dream.

Government hospitals offer treatments, other offline hospital. This is an

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