Doctily Digital Health

Digital integration of maternal and child health processes to reduce the turnaround times, costs and empower patients with health information

We conducted a Survey in the city of Hyderabad, India among all the Pediatricians and Gynecologists to ascertain the details of the level of their readiness to use an integrated digital health solution. We surveyed a total of 120 Gynecologist practices and 112 Pediatric practices. We found that 80% of these clinics do not have a computer and internet connection. Rest of the clinics have computers but most of them do not use them for creating digital prescriptions and medical records. Only 60% of the clinics have a laboratory in house and half of them are outsourced to a third party. Overall the clinics are working independently without getting into an integrated system for healthcare delivery to enable their clients access health information from one source.

Healthcare in India is very complex and fragmented. Various kinds of healthcare services like doctor consultations, diagnostic tests, vaccinations, preventive health checks and hospitalizations are not connected to each other. Even though some of these services are digitized, they are not integrated with each other. This failed to give the beneficiaries a single and uniform platform to access their health information, avail health services and pay for them. In addition to this problem of fragmentation, more than 80% of the population in India is not covered by health insurance. Digitization of health records and integration of all the aspects of healthcare services helps in the assessment of health risk of the people and arriving at more accurate and affordable insurance premium. Low health insurance premiums would attract more people to subscribe and keep their health secured.

Maternal and child health is an important area which needs digitization to make lives of the people better and make healthcare measurable. We designed a digital healthcare platform through which the Gynecologists and Pediatricians can create and share the medical records of their patients. The patients are empowered with the health information specific their condition which helps them in managing their health better. The Doctily digital health platform not only stores the health records but allows the doctors to diagnose the health problems more accurately with its clinical decision support system. The clinical decision support system has dual advantages for doctors; it enables them diagnose patients' conditions more accurately and, it helps them in creating digital prescriptions with a touch interface avoiding typing. This saves the doctors' time and improves accuracy. We also integrated the diagnostic test reports into our platform which in turn help the doctors in decision making and also alleviates the need for the patients to visit the diagnostic center for reports. Doctily’s digital health platform also improves the medication compliance by keeping the patients informed about the medicines that they need to take and precautions that they need to follow. Doctily's complete clinic solution makes a trained person available in the practices of Gynecologists and Pediatricians to collect the test samples and make sure that the drugs prescribed are available and dispensed correctly and on time.

Our solution offers an end to end digitization platform for healthcare. Our unique clinical decision support system helps the doctors in creating digital health records and arriving at accurate diagnosis. We partnered with diagnostic centers to digitize laboratory reports so that the patient’s health record is complete. The patients can subscribe to our app through which they can access their complete electronic health records and health condition specific information so that they can better comply with the treatment and other instructions. This gives them a single platform to access and manage their health.

We are calling ourselves digital health enablers because our vision is to see that the doctors are empowered with innovative technology and knowledge of latest updates in medical science. The pregnant mothers and parents of children will be benefited with our app through which they can access their electronic health records, their condition specific health information, vaccination reminders, drug reminders and growth charts and developmental milestones. Our application is cloud based digital health platform and it is incorporated with a unique artificial intelligence system which helps the doctors in clinical decision making and creating digital health records seamlessly.

Our goals over the next 12 months:

• Incrementally add 50 doctors every 3 months to our platform and reach a target of 200 doctors using our app for their practice.
• Help create digital and complete health records of 375,000 patients at all of our doctors’ clinics.
• A total of 37,500 patients subscribed to our patient app and using it regularly for their healthcare needs.
• Generate revenue of Rs.750,000 from the doctors’ subscription to our app.
• Generate revenue of Rs.18,750,000 from the patients’ subscription to our app.
• Reduce the turnaround time for the review visit of the patients by 20%

We want to see that a growing number of doctors use our digital health platform to manage their practice. We see that at least 5 million people are impacted through our app and improve their health outcomes and reduce their time spent over the doctor visits. We want to empower pregnant women and parents of growing children with accurate and timely health information. We plan to scale up the solution in three ways:

• By the end of three years we are targeting 600 doctors and 5400000 patients
• by the end of five years we are targeting 1000 doctors and 15000000 patients

Our solution will be placed with Gynecologists and Pediatricians who are privately practicing in India. These doctors generate electronic health records by using our solution. This way we reach every client visiting the doctor's clinic. We plan to retain our customers by keeping them engaged with and connected to the doctor and providing them most specific health information which helps them in complying with the doctor's instructions and enables them to manage their health better. Our solution helps the doctors and patients reduce the effort and turnaround time for review visits thereby improving their satisfaction. 

Our product is going to be ready by the end of July and we are targeting 50 doctors every 3 months who would be using our app to manage their practice.

We are expecting that in 12 months’ time, 200 doctors including pediatricians and gynecologists would be using our solution and a minimum of 2000 patients in a day with their electronic health records and their condition specific health information. In three years we are targeting 600 doctors and 5400000 patients on an average. Pregnant mothers and young infants and children would be empowered by our app via periodic updates about their health and health information in terms reminders for their medications, vaccination, growth and development charts and ability to get answers from the doctors, improving their health outcomes.

Our team includes two doctors with managerial experience, one software engineer and two healthcare business leaders. We carry an average of 20 years’ experience in our respective areas. Our vision is to spearhead the digital health revolution in India and empower doctors with a unique platform to improve their practice and help patients manage their health better and reduce costs. The multidisciplinary nature of our team and significant experience that we have will help us in bringing the necessary resources into the solution and scale it appropriately. We are passionate about creating an impact by improving people’s health.

Our revenue model is via doctor and patient subscription to our app. Our app for doctors is featured with a clinical decision support system which is speciality specific and guides them with accurate diagnosis with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Patient subscriptions are another point of revenue. Our patient app provides the patients with their complete digital health record and their health condition specific information.

mHealth is one of the biggest sectors in India within digital healthcare, with a projected market size of 416 million USD in 2015, which is set to increase to 1 Billion USD INR by 2020. The future of healthcare is going to be dominated by digital health providers.

We are addressing a very important health sector issue with our solution i.e. empowering people with their health records and appropriate health information. We are also making healthcare processes and outcomes measurable with our end to end digitization platform. Hence our solution would have long term sustainability and growth. The expansion of digitally enabled solutions has become easy with ecommerce revolution and social media influencing people’s lives. We want to leverage this online revolution to promote and scale our product.

Solve is a platform through which we can showcase our solution to a global audience and it helps us receive critical feedback on our solution. We look at this as a platform for networking for potential partnerships in terms of technical mentorship, organizational strategy and funding.

We would like to understand the solutions and take learning from other solvers in the challenge frontlines of health.

Doctors are used to writing prescriptions manually for years and changing their behavior and adoption to digital prescriptions is an important challenge that we would face. Solve can help us by promoting a message that digitization in healthcare is inevitable because of its advantages.