MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name:

Covid Inventory Optimisation

One-line solution summary:

Early warning system for detecting Covid hotspots, studying disease progression and improving supply chain for covid medicines in India

Pitch your solution.

In India, covid is at its peak right now. 1mg.com is India's largest online healthcare service providers where users from India can search for medicine information, order medicines, lab tests, and talk to specialist doctors.

We have built a tool to capture medicine trends for all types of Covid medication across 1000+ cities in India. We also have prescriptions, e-consultations and lab tests done by users showing Covid Symptoms.

Using these data sources and trend analysis tool, we are piloting with the following solutions.

Hotspot Predictions for Covid Cases with a lag of 10-14 days
Disease Progression showing movements of patients from Mild to Moderate to Severe Medications
Planning Inventory (Availability of Covid Medications) at city level

The solution currently caters to cities in India, which itself is immensely impactful. With other sources of search data, this can be scaled globally.

Film your elevator pitch.

What specific problem are you solving?

During the pandemic spread, testing facilities and supply of critical medications was hit by unforeseen demand spikes. Such was the magnitude that government reported data was not a true depicting of the underlying rise and fall of cases creating panic and rush for health facilities.

1mg has a customer base of over 50 million MAUs (monthly active users) from 1000+ cities which uses 1mg for searching for medicine information, order medicines, lab tests, and talk to specialist doctors.

Using the variety of data sources at our disposal - medication searches, orders, lab tests, prescriptions, e-consultations, we have built a trend analysis tool to analyse the upticks and downticks in demand for various medications. This is at a city level for 1000+ cities in India nearly covering a majority of the country's population.

Our tool can effectively estimate upcoming shortages in the 1000+ cities as well as the criticality of the medications being demanded with a lead of 10-14 days.

This can save these communities from overburdening their medical infrastructure and stay prepared with the correct levels of critical medication stocks.

What is your solution?

Our solution work in aggregated search term groups and medication views from various cities. To early detect, we club 1mg searches into multiple categories related to Covid (below).

For validation, we plotted 1mg searches and actual confirmed cases obtained from John Hopkins University and found a significantly high correlation. It was 0.95+ for both New Delhi and Mumbai region. A lagged correlation analysis on 100+ cities, showed that we are able to predict this trend at almost a lead of 10-14 days.

We started building this solution when the Mumbai/Delhi peak was already in sight. However, initial validation of our solution happened when we were able to detect the rising trends on the eastern India almost 2-3 weeks before the actual peak onset.

We also have Covid related prescriptions and e-consultations for multiple patients on 1mg. Physicians record history of symptoms for the patient. We have collected multiple samples of this data and found the symptoms highly correlating with the rise of covid cases in India.

This data is being used to study the progression of symptoms over time and help in understanding the disease dynamics over various ages and gender features.

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Using the data sources and trend analysis tool at our disposal, we are piloting with the following solutions.

Hotspot Predictions for Covid Cases with a lag of 10-14 days
Disease Progression showing movements of patients from Mild to Moderate to Severe Medications
Planning Inventory (Availability of Covid Medications) at city level

Hotspot Predictions for Covid Cases with a lag of 10-14 days

Detection of Hotspots can aid administration as well as the medical community and infrastructure to be prepared in advance before the surge of cases in the future. Administration can properly strategise the quarantine rules, opening lockdowns in a seamless manner using this solution. Medical Infrastructure has been heavily impacted in various parts of the country due to the pandemic and it can be solved through identifying hotspots before time for the well being of the overall community as well as reduce the spread.

Disease Progression showing movements of patients from Mild to Moderate to Severe Medications

Since covid is really dynamic due to ever changing variants, disease progression is really critical to understand. This can be used for medical research community where changes in age groups suffering from covid over time can be comprehended along with the disease symptom changes. This solution has the potential to affect the overall medical research community as well as help healthcare workers to tackle the disease with updated information regarding the pandemic at every step along the way.

Planning Inventory (Availability of Covid Medications) at city level

Covid led to a huge medical supply crunch, which led to multiple fatalities due to unplanned supply chain across all levels. Given the reach of 1mg is across more than 1000+ cities in India and have over 8 operational warehouses, maintaining proper stock levels for critical medications would help every citizen to avail such medication and that too at a smaller delivery time. Patients who are hospitalised due to lack of medication availability at the right time will be hugely benefitted from this solution.

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Strengthen disease surveillance, early warning predictive systems, and other data systems to detect, slow, or halt future disease outbreaks.

Explain how the problem you are addressing, the solution you have designed, and the population you are serving align with the Challenge.

Our aim for this Solution is to help Indian cities to early-detect future pandemic waves, stay prepared and respond with actionable insights.

The three solutions we are working on are -

Early Hotspot Detection,
Disease Progression
Inventory Planning for Covid Medications

These solutions together are aimed at helping city administrations and their medical infrastructure to stay alert and increase healthcare supply at an opportune time. These tools in the hands of the administration give them a 10-14 day warning and granular actionable insights to be able to serve the demand for critical medications and testing and treatment facilities better.

In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?

Gurgaon, Haryana, India

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Pilot: An organization deploying a tested product, service, or business model in at least one community.

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution.

We are currently working on improving and scaling our solution to multiple parts of the world. We have currently deployed a pilot for major Indian cities which can be found at this link: 1mg covid trends for India. On this link one can assess the uptrends and downtrends in Indian cities using the additional 1mg Covid related activity of our users. In a lot of cities, we see a matching trends with the on-the-ground results.

We are working closely with researchers from MIT, Harvard and IIT Delhi as well as the PathCheck foundation to build a superior early warning system which could be used for a potential third wave of Covid. A couple of research papers on the prediction methodology and analysis of the variety of data sources are in the pipeline.

Scaling globally would also be possible using medicine search data/trends for individual countries.

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Gaurav Agarwal