SeeVitals

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a standard of 1 nurse per 5 patients (1:5) whereas, in Pakistan, 1 nurse caters to 50 patients (1:50). Similarly, 1 doctor for every 1000 patients is the standard, whereas, in Pakistan, it is 1:1300. This is part of the reason why Pakistan lies in the top 57 countries with critical health workforce deficiency. It proves that our overworked healthcare staff is prone to human error during simple clerical tasks and causes deficiencies in a high-pressure environment that can otherwise be avoided. These tasks include recording, charting, monitoring, assessment of vitals, and regular check-ins to update patients’ stats. Unnecessary manual inputting and recording of data, not only poses a risk for patient safety but also hospital-acquired infections and communicable diseases. This has further led to a healthcare delivery system that has a lower quality of standard, with increased hospitalization rates, longer lengths of stays, and a fragmented data collection system.

Pakistan is in dire need of the collection of health data and statistics to regulate healthcare frameworks and achieve health policies to target the emerging diseases to achieve the Sustainable Developmental Goals 3 as defined by the WHO. 

A Johns Hopkins study also confirms that there is at least a 15% decrease in morbidity of patients in computerized hospital records. "Computerizing notes and records might have the potential to save 100,000 lives annually, in the USA alone."-  Neil R. Powe, M.D., M.P.H. M.B.A, of the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

A remote patient monitoring hardware and software solution. The palm-sized device measures continuous patient vitals in a contactless manner (nothing is attached to the human body) displaying real-time data on remote devices. Our device uses a special type of ballistocardiography sensor combined with accelerometers and inclinometers to measure heart rate, respiratory rate, heart rate variability, stroke volume, and associated vitals recommended in a high dependency unit. This will allow our software system to generate health analytics and data trends using AI and ML to detect high-risk patients and prompt an early warning system based on the health data. Our product will be easily integrated with the existing hospital management systems including the screens and the beds in the hospitals, home care services, ambulances, and more. 

In Hospitals

Our solution also makes it easier to access, analyze and assess patients’ conditions and early risk assessment of patients requiring extra care. It controls paper waste, optimizes patient charting by eliminating human error, and positively impacts hospital infection control. It increases the quality of care of the patient with a smart prioritization system where the most debilitating patients are highlighted, decreases long-term hospitals stays and readmissions, decreases the burden of disease, and significantly improves outcomes for our patients. 

For rural healthcare settings

Our cost-effective solution is aimed to integrate clinics and hospitals from all over the country. This would mean access and ease for patients from the most remote areas to centralized areas, all getting the same level of care and attention. The size and low cost will make it convenient to be placed in any hospital or home-care setting that has a regular bed that can be converted into a high dependency unit. The primary & secondary healthcare facilities of Pakistan are severely under-utilized due to high costs and lack of infrastructure. Our solution will act as a bridge to combine quality healthcare and technology to ease access across our community.

For Healthcare staff

Our nurses are weighed down by clerical work, continuous charting, and restrictions to providing their optimum best where they can excel in their fields. The environment in a high dependency unit should be quick, convenient and leave room to access and give attention to patient care rather than file management.

Aimon and I (Nimra) particularly come from healthcare backgrounds, which has given us the opportunity to be very close to the patients and the healthcare staff. This was immensely helpful in understanding their pain points. Our diverse experience in private healthcare settings, the public sector where I have personally served in the Accident and Emergency of the largest public hospital in Pakistan. Both Aimon and I have experience working in the Middle East, the USA, and the UK (NHS) healthcare system which has helped us to recognize the gaps in our local health industry. Aimon has served as the front-line healthcare worker, being one of the first ones, in the times of COVID in the COVID-ICU during the peak uncertainty of it in March 2020. Nimra has volunteered in numerous health camps, especially in the rural areas where she has gone down to the districts with no water and electricity to set up health camps and promote health-seeking behaviors. Nimra has also been thoroughly involved in consulting for the World Bank and the Government of Pakistan in promoting preventative healthcare approaches and rehabilitating the primary healthcare sector by decreasing the cost of health that the patient has to bear and getting treated free of cost. 

While developing the solution, the overburdened and overstressed healthcare staff, as well as the underprivileged patients, have been reached out to at every point to understand their pain points. The application and the dashboard are being developed with the consultation of the healthcare workers that will be using it. The affordability and the nature of measuring vitals remotely by increasing access to healthcare are drawn by keeping in mind the people who have trouble gaining access to healthcare. 

Dayyan adds to the beautifully by being a self-made software developer who has established his own software house from zero. His humbleness and technical skills complement the vision of seevitals solutions, where he is the chief technology officer handling the tech in the health "tech". Dayyan being passionate about the healthcare field has joined Aimon and me in learning Basic Life Support where we have reached out to multiple people in the community under the Emergency Medical Services of our university. 

Our technology will be first-of-its-kind in Pakistan therefore procuring the sensors from around the world is not only expensive but also a time-consuming and tedious task. The technology also has limited research available in other countries so we are conducting our own research and development from scratch and will be taking the device for clinical trials of our own. To sustain this process, we will need to move out of bootstrapping and look for mentorship, support in research and development, and funding to expedite the processes. 

The device itself will also have to go through patency checks and medical-grade accuracy tests for which we require reliable strategic partnerships. For this reason, we would require continuous legal advice and financial backing. To protect patient data, the technology we are working on is all in-house requiring hiring multiple experts to carry out extensive and iterative R&D as we move into other verticals such as developing a command and control center. 

Our solution is based on using non-contact technology to monitor vitals that can be integrated with the already existing Hospital Information Management System giving a centralized dashboard of all patients that are being monitored by the device itself. This would integrate all the parameters and allow an early warning system to be generated alerting the physicians and the healthcare workers on their devices/tabs/phones as well as the centralized dashboard of the hospital. 

Being non-contact has numerous advantages of allowing for a comfortable patient-doctor interaction without the use of wires being attached to the body. This helps the patient to move freely and lowers their anxiety levels as well releases the patient and the healthcare staff from the discomfort of constantly attaching/reattaching wires. Additionally, non-contact has proven to lower hospital-acquired infection, leading to better sterilization and prognosis of the patient. Since this device can be used on ANY bed, it can turn a normal hospital bed into an equivalent of a High-Dependency Unit (HDU) decreasing the cost for the hospitals/patients. This is specifically useful in rural healthcare settings where a broad infrastructure would not be needed and our product would convert their normal beds into an HDU. 

The early warning system that can alert the physicians is extremely catalytic in early diagnosis and preventative measures that can drastically reduce health risks and cater to health-seeking behavior in individuals at home, as well as the patients at hospitals. Our solution overall is expandable into ambulances, burn centers, old-age homes, and even to the general public at home. 

All of this as a device and the integrative software solution leads to lower costs for the hospitals, better operational efficiencies, better utilization of the healthcare human resources, and amplifying the critical healthcare services in remote areas. 

We want to take a step towards digitizing Pakistan's healthcare system and bringing it onto one platform. We plan on doing this by recording and maintaining patient health data that can be accessed by authorities all over the world. It will open doors for research and development owing to studying health trends, health analytics, and integration through Artificial Intelligence.

We are also increasing access to health and promoting health-seeking behaviors in populations that lack these. We aim to mobilize these people that contribute to the lower socioeconomic labor class of our country. The remote system will allow a better quality of health services available even in the marginalized communities without the need for costly infrastructure or transport to tertiary care for consultations. We are penetrating remote and rural areas of Pakistan that will facilitate this data collection and contribute to health statistics studies in Pakistan, resulting in more accurate research and more comprehensive, tailor-made solutions to transform the current health system in Pakistan and eventually globally.

- Increase the number of beds by 5% each year. 

- Facilitate at least 30% of private and public hospitals by 2030. 

- Creation of new jobs: development of our solutions requires human resources (25 positions initially for the complete development and deployment of the solution and as we expand creation of 150+ jobs; in line with SDG 8). 

- Retention of medical professionals in the hospitals where data is digitized and they have the ease of monitoring patients remotely (against the hospital's existing figures). 

- Qualitative survey measuring the healthcare staff's burden and work-life balance using HRM and KPIs met. 

- Collaborate with the Government for universal healthcare coverage as a result of accessing patient data across the country (Universal Health Coverage is already underway in Pakistan as Sehat Sahulat Program, which I, as a founder have worked closely within the public sector level). 

- Having a health database that gives the burden of disease and highlights the geographical areas those need interventions. (Merging this with the existing public healthcare sets data, no such data exists for private hospitals).

McKinsey conducted a survey in which workers believe that automating tasks will reduce the wasted time (69 percent), eliminate human error (66 percent), and recover hours lost to manual, repetitive tasks that could otherwise be automated (59 percent). 

Our services work in exactly that way in which we help convert the clerical tasks of hospital staff into automated procedures that can translate into more time for serving patients. In a study published by the Permanente Journal, 35% of a nurse's time is spent on manual documentation and charting. In another study, we found that among all clerical time, nurses spent the most time charting and reviewing i.e. 25% of the time is used in documentation. 

From the average salary of a nurse who works an 8-hour shift per day, 35% of this money is wasted on only documentation and the possible care of several patients. An additional 35% loss is incurred for patients' time and hospitals' income (national library of medicine). Saving these 2.8 hours per day per nurse per shift could help cater to faster care and eliminate the waste of nurses' potential to help serve more patients. As the Average Length of Stay (LOS) in a hospital ICU in 3.3 days (79.2 hours) and the standard ratio for the nurse to ICU bed is 1:1, we are providing a cost saving of up to 9 patients, per nurse, per year. In an article by JPMA of Pakistan, the average cost of 1 patient in the ICU multiplied by 9 patients is a huge profit for just 1 nurse's time saved. 

These calculations are exponential with the number of nurses and the number of beds available in a hospital, therefore our solution is leading to faster documentation making faster admissions as well as faster discharges. Our device also provides a seamless experience, reducing the anxieties of patients that need to be hooked to several nodes, electrodes, and wires otherwise. It reduces the rate of hospital-acquired infections through its contactless technology and simultaneously reduces margins of human error and variation during the charting and reviewing process.

SeeVitals is a remote patient monitoring system solution, with integrated hardware and software. Our product includes mobile applications for nurses and doctors. Similarly, seamless integration of actionable data to user-friendly dashboards leads to timely analysis and empowers clinicians to intervene if necessary, Web dashboards monitor 8 measurements(ECG, BCG, Respiration Rate, Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability, Stroke Volume, Bed Vacancy Status, Sleep Cycle) in real-time with customizable alerts on system and apps. Furthermore, with our AI algorithms, we’re calculating an EWS score for early risk assessment and providing integration with HIMS. 

On the hardware side, we’re using inclinometers and accelerometers to measure the mechanical pumping of the heart. This technique is called Ballistocardiography  (BCG) which gives both the time and relative Stroke Volume (SV) of every heartbeat.

We started as a woman-led startup in the healthcare industry, which is largely dominated by men. This enables us being on the other side to understand the pain point of the gender gap and we are very serious about addressing it through our hiring process which is inclusive of all. The team that works currently, has allotted seats for women developers. We are not discriminatory against color, age, race, gender, and identity. We are actively looking for ANYONE that can match the energy and the drive we as a company share.

The motivation that brought about the inception of the company was always to serve the healthcare spectrum, keeping in mind its most human element. With this passion, we decided to have a culture of the company that involves transparent communication without any barriers or hierarchy with an open-door policy. 

We are in our initial stages and yet, we have built relationships around the startup community without the barriers of caste, color, age, race, and gender. We hope to keep diversifying and being inclusive with the purpose of solely creating a community that shares mutual respect and determination to make it a safer and more comfortable environment to work in. 

Our business model focuses initially on a B2B approach where we first target the hospitals and with time move to the B2C market increasing access to healthcare for all. Our key customers initially are the hospitals that will utilize our device for remote monitoring, AI-enabled early warning system, and preventative diagnostic usage. A value proposition of being non-contact reduces hospital-acquired infections and increases portability with the addition of low cost. SeeVitals helps in lowering the economic cost of nursing hours, doctors-hours, increased patient and doctor comfort, lower length of hospital stays, and maximized ICU-bed throughput. We plan to reach out to the hospitals directly for the sale of the product. We have a two-way stream revenue-making model.

1- One-time revenue from selling, installing, and training (minimal) the device/bed.

2- Recurrent Subscription revenue based on the SaaS model for the utilization of the dashboard and web-based app services/annum.

We are looking to raise investments through investment capital and grants (specifically to fund the R&D), in exchange for an equity percentage. This involves getting strategic partners/investors on board that can help redirect the legal as well as financial assistance into commercializing the product after the clinical trials. 

As per our financials, SeeVitals is likely to break even in the second year of operations and become self-sustaining based on the revenue-making model. 

1- One-time revenue from selling, installing, and training (minimal) the device/bed.

2- Recurrent Subscription revenue based on the SaaS model for the utilization of the dashboard and web-based app services/annum.

Recently received prize money from the President of Pakistan at a national level competition for health-tech. Received the second prize in the health-tech sector overall in Pakistan, by the national idea bank- an initiative of Pakistan's government. 

Major investment is all boot-strapping from our own resources to fund the solution until we can deliver it to the public, soon.