Saathealth: Building Healthier Communities

Saathealth combines its AI powered digital platform with behaviour change communications to guide health consumers towards positive health outcomes.

Dr Aakash Ganju, MD (Co-Founder & CEO)

Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) account for 71% of annual global deaths, most of these in low and middle income countries (LMICs) and estimated to cost $47 trillion to the global economy by 2030. Chronic underinvestment in prevention, early diagnosis, screening, treatment & rehabilitation has contributed to an escalating NCD burden. Much of this burden is being exacerbated by COVID-19, which is disrupting essential public healthcare services and placing people living with NCDs at a higher risk of becoming severely ill or dying from COVID-19.

Recent data from the WHO report 50% fewer attendance in cardiac OPDs, 46% countries reporting closure of population level screening programs, 21% reduction in institutional deliveries and a 32% fall in inpatient care for pulmonary conditions. More than 46% countries globally have reported closure of population wide screening programs as resources get diverted to managing COVID related issues.

Given limited supply side resources and pre-existing healthcare access issues, it is essential to reach, engage and nudge healthcare consumers towards positive preventive health practices. This will reduce the burden on health workers globally and alleviate the health and economic impact of the escalating burden of COVID-19 on public health services.

COVID-19 has led to patients and health consumers delaying elective interventions for their health conditions. Concurrently, health worker resources are being diverted to managing acute COVID-19 related issues. Patient groups globally, and across the digital spectrum, are looking for preventive, digital health interventions that allow them to manage their own health, with escalation to a physical health provider meeting, only if necessary. 

Most interventions are focused on clinic/facility based activities leaving patients to address their health information needs through a wide variety of online resources, of varying credibility. Our solution addresses the need of health consumers for credible tools and information to manage their health conditions. By proactively engaging with patients via our digital platform and behaviour change nudges, we adopt a proactive approach to influencing patient knowledge and behaviors. The use of digital platforms and real time allows for reaching patients at a relatively low cost, while iterating the intervention in real time, in order to respond dynamically with the evolving patient needs. Finally, our real time analytics and real time insights features allows health administrator to evaluate patient feedback on an ongoing basis.

Our mission is to provide the tools for health consumers, patients and health workers to invest in preventive health interventions and outcomes. Our model provides patients and health consumers with free access to the knowledge and tools to support their health behaviour change. Governments and healthcare organizations bear the investment into these interventions due to the improved outcomes from preventive health behaviour change.

Our children’s health application is freely available in India and our entire library of children’s health and nutrition content is freely available for organizations and users globally. Our library of preventive health content for non-communicable diseases has also been made freely available online. We publish our impact in annual reports and our work with health consumers have been published in several peer reviewed publications.

Our partners are large healthcare organizations (government, social sector funders, healthcare delivery groups, pharmaceutical companies), all of whom are recognizing that the growing cost of healthcare in the post-covid era, necessitates reaching health consumers with digital, preventive health solutions. By investing in such solutions, our partner organizations can contain healthcare costs and also improve patient outcomes. Our theory of change is that digital, preventive health information leads to improvements in health knowledge, behaviors, community advocacy, improved clinical outcomes and reduced burden on health worker resources. Our work at scale with children’s health in India has demonstrated the efficacy of this approach. Please refer to the resources slide in our attached document for details on how our solution is driving positive health outcomes.

Our product is geography agnostic and we can deploy in markets around the world.

For our government partnerships, we are currently focused on working with the Indian government to scale across public health providers. We are also in early discussions with PATH and the Asian Development Bank to support several of their post-Covid health challenges across India.

In addition, we are building partnerships with social sector funders like RTI International. We continue to explore government partnerships in ex-India markets with social sector funders.

Additionally, we are also in advanced discussions with several pharmaceutical companies and large primary healthcare providers, within and outside India, to support their post-COVID strategies of augmenting patient care within community settings. In 2021-22, our priority is to focus on low and middle income countries. During this period, we will invest in product development and scale-up. Based on our research, we expect to be ready for the US/ EU markets by 2023/2024. We expect to scale from 5 annual deployments in 2021 to 30 deployments by 2023 and 40 in 2024. In partnership with the above partners, we aim to reach millions of patients to support their health within community settings over the next 5 years.

Our primary focus areas are targeting non-communicable diseases and strengthening capacity for early warning, risk reduction and management of health risks, in the context of COVID-19. Managing these conditions has become even more critical in the post-COVID era, because patients with co-morbidities are at a higher risk of adverse outcomes due to virus' impact on health systems.

Our solution guides health consumers and patients towards primary and secondary prevention related outcomes like improvement in health knowledge, behaviors and clinical outcomes.

Innovative care models that solve the challenge of unequal access, capacity, capability, and affordability will empower health consumers globally to improve chronic health conditions.

We measure the impact of our interventions by specific deployments based on the following criteria-

Engagement numbers – users reached and served, health content consumed (volume and time) by patients, duration of engagement, virality created

Knowledge shifts – Improvement in health knowledge compared to baseline

Behavioral shifts – Reported shifts in behaviors (nutrition/ exercise habits, consumption of alcohol/ smoking, medication adherence/ clinical compliance etc)

Clinical outcomes – Will be measured based on specific use cases. Examples may include hospitalization or worsening symptoms in high-risk chronic cases

We have three priority needs right now which are also critical to address our goals over the next 3 years.

1.We will need to invest in our product team and our AI roadmap to be able to harness the value of our machine learning algorithms for serving patients across geography. While product investments are mainly focused on building our machine learning and data sciences teams, we will also use these investments to build scale, agility and adaptability within our platform.

2. We need to invest in building partnerships across the geographies that we aim to deploy in

3. Finally, we will need to build local relationships in countries of deployment to ensure that our platform deployments capture the nuances of local healthcare systems and supply chains

India's National Health Authority, RTI International, Google Advisor program for SDG startups, Sesame Workshop, UNICEF, Swasth Digital

Our 2021-2022 priorities are to

1.     Identify and raise funding from like-minded partners (3 -6 months)

2.     Deploy and continue to demonstrate the clinical value of our AI algorithms with health partners in different geographies

3.     Continue to build out and invest in our AI roadmap while balancing short term challenges

4.     Continue to demonstrate the clinical outcomes of our solution with organizations looking to serve post-COVID patient needs

We are applying to the Trinity challenge for three main objectives

1.     Connect with like-minded, tech partners that are leveraging frontier technologies to solve address health challenges in a post-COVID world

2.     Provide us a platform to identify tech leaders who are interested to support us in an advisory and/or executive capacity. Make connections with healthcare partners that we can work with for our growth deployment strategies

3. Make connections with healthcare partners that we can work with for our growth deployment strategies.

We are looking to partner with 3 types of organizations-

1.     Technology leaders working at the frontiers of healthcare to support us and/ or partner with our solutions

2.     Large social sector and private sector healthcare organizations that have the vision to invest in patient focused interventions in the post-COVID, recognizing that healthcare workers will be significantly challenged to meet the needs of health consumers and patients

3.     Governments/ public health organizations that are looking to deploy digital, direct to health consumer preventive health solutions to improve clinical outcomes

Working with these organizations will help Saathealth in demonstrating the efficacy of our solution at scale and in a manner that yields positive and sustainable clinical outcomes.