The inadequacy of chronic healthcare in India was revealed to Raghuraj Sunder Raju when he was diagnosed with hyperuricemia in 2013, a chronic metabolic problem that causes the blood to contain high amounts of uric acid. He realized that there is a lacuna in handling chronic diseases that were similar to treating acute diseases by the Indian doctors. Patients suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes go through an ordeal of regular blood-sugar level monitoring, but they need more than monitoring and treatment. To keep chronic diseases like diabetes under check, it requires a systematic approach of holistic care for the patients. As per INDIAB Study, presently in India, there are 72.96 million cases of diabetes in the adult population. Frustrated by the condition in tackling chronic diseases in the country, he decided to improve the treatment outcome by leveraging technology which gave birth to HealthPlix.
The inception of HealthPlix
HealthPlix was founded in 2014, by Raghuraj Sunder Raju, Sandeep Gudibanda, and Prasad Basavaraj. It is a mobile app that connects patients to doctors for real-time messaging. HealthPlix has a SaaS-based EMR software ( Electronic Medical Records ) that helps doctors to get real-time access to their patients’ cases for better diagnosis by shortening the lead time to arrive at the right treatment for a patient. It enables the patients to avail video consultations with highly qualified specialists and super-specialist doctors.
HealthPlix supports the doctors with clinical decision support by generating e-prescriptions and automating the operations of the clinic. Through HealthPlix’s software, a doctor can write prescriptions in 30 seconds. Besides e-prescriptions, it offers digital lab reports, billing and dashboards.
Offering personalised healthcare to patients
In diabetes, no two cases are identical. The treatment also varies for different patients for similar blood sugar levels since it is dependent on patients’ insulin deficiency and resistance. Hence, HealthPlix believes in personalising the treatment. In the HealthPlix app, patients can record their blood sugar levels, meals, activity and insulin intake, which can be shared with the doctors. The personalised treatment from HealthPlix encompasses several iterations of monitoring of blood sugar levels, insulin intake, activity, and food data for a corresponding medicine titration. Patients receive tips and advice from doctors through continuous interactions by referring to the medical records. A patient can receive optimum medication through multiple quick iterations through HealthPlix.
Going Local with Prescriptions
Respecting the fact that rural India is not comfortable with the English language, HealthPlix has a feature to provide doctor’s prescriptions in 22 regional languages.
AI-powered prescriptions and disease detection
HealthPlix’s AI-powered feature analyses a doctor’s historical prescribing preferences and provides relevant autofill recommendations for faster prescriptions. AI enables the doctors to detect diseases early by analysis of the longitudinal journey of patients. With the analysis, doctors can gauge their practice performance and track patient’s health status over time. It also enables the digitization of printed prescriptions and test reports.
HealthPlix Now
HealthPlix has onboarded doctors with more than 20 specialties on its platform. Till date, it has served 1.08 crore patients with a presence expanding in more than 374 cities and offers more than 9,50,000 medical consultations monthly.
Why should startups foray into the healthcare industry?
Tier-II and tier-III cities are devoid of affordable and proper healthcare infrastructure. The doctor to patient ratio is skewed in rural areas. Thus, those healthcare startups will be seen as winners who will be offering an affordable healthcare system by giving the patients healthcare access to qualified doctors. The right mix of healthcare features to address the needs of rural masses, will stimulate the demand for adopting digital healthcare. The government of India, through its initiative of establishing COE ( Centre of Excellence), has launched Medtech, an incubator for encouraging research and development in startups in the field of medical electronics and health informatics to offer affordable high-quality healthcare.
