BirthMithra - A one stop solution for all delivery needs.
We are trying to solve the issue of unavailability of proper and efficient healthcare facilities available at the right time to pregnant mothers. We see that inspite of the advancements of technology, there are still gaps in the maternal sector that are leading to an increase in the maternal mortality rate.
We see that there is unavailability of resources in the primary healthcare centres and there is a need for a standalone device that can cater to the needs of pregnant women. Thus the doctors are relying on indigenous methods to treat the pregnant women leading to more casualties. There are more than 100 mothers dying in India alone due to unavailability of the right resources at the right time. Globally, the average mortality rate each day would rise above 800. Every year in India alone there are about 40,000 mothers dying during childbirth and everyday there are about 107 ambulance deliveries occurring.
This will also affect the future of the newborn and their families, leaving a long lasting impact on their lives. We are thus focusing on the maternal issues that are prevalent in the developed, under developed and developing countries including India.
In most of the cases of pregnant mothers in developing and underdeveloped countries, since there are no required facilities in the primary healthcare centres and the rural hospitals, pregnant mothers are forced to travel long distances to reach the multispecialty hospitals in order to have a safe and comfortable delivery. Thus there are no required facilities for any pregnant mother to have a safe delivery. In many cases, there is an increased waiting period. Also the majority of pregnant mothers deliver their baby on the way to the hospitals or in ambulances resulting in a delivery being performed in a very unsafe and unsterilized environment.
We also understand that even the multi specialty hospitals in the developed countries have only facilities confined to the NICU settings and only have limited resources with the beds shifting to only two positions. Most of these resources tend towards c section deliveries. Also these are only confined only to the upper income groups of the society.
Thus there is a need for a dynamic device that can solve the needs of pregnant mothers from all backgrounds.
We are developing the world's first flexible delivery bed that has a potential to conduct safe natural deliveries in any resource constrained settings, a device with a potential to cater to all emergency conditions in any challenging environments. It is designed as a device to equally fit into the multispecialty hospitals and resource-constrained settings.
It has unique features of compact size that makes it fit into the ambulance as well, to reach to the pregnant mothers where there are no primary facilities , lightweight to be carried to places like tribal hamlets where there is no facility for reaching of ambulances, portability attained with the use of quality and standard castor wheels , foldability that results in the compact size of the device making it ambulance fit and perfect for the space constrained settings. It is a convertible box that opens up into a delivery bed and provides entire facilities to conduct safe natural deliveries.
The convertible mechanism makes it easy to be shifted to different birthing positions according to the needs of the mother giving her the privilege to shift herself to different birthing positions as per her needs. The device is also equipped with an emergency delivery kit including a focused light unit that can be used during episiotomy, a suction unit that has two different pressure points.
We are thus introducing a revolutionary product, BirthMithra into the maternal market to bring the maternal mortality rate close to zero due to unavailability of facilities. With the introduction of our device into the market, we are facilitating the primary healthcare settings to be capable of saving mothers and the multi specialty hospitals turn into well equipped premium healthcare settings serving multiple women equally.
We have a flexible product that caters to all sectors of the population ranging from the primary healthcare settings of the under developed countries to the multi specialty hospitals of the developed countries. Our major market segment will be the developing countries, as we are entering the market, starting with the Indian subcontinent.
Every year in India alone 2.2 Cr babies are born. Each day there are about 107 mothers who die due to preventable causes during childbirth. Globally this number goes as high as 810. and every Hour at least 5 ambulance deliveries are reported, these occur due to the lack of facilities and the distances between the local centres to hospitals. The average Maternal mortality Rate (MMR)is 130 per every 1 L births, in states like Assam, Bihar, and Rajasthan it shoots up to 300.
We have more than 2 lakh healthcare centres and more than 50,000 ambulances in use to carry pregnant women. India has 23,391 primary healthcare centres (PHC's) and 145,894 sub centres providing health service to 72.2% of the country's population. There are 10017 ambulances and 5484 empanelled vehicles to transport pregnant women to the hospitals.
To have an initial market entry we have a diversified revenue model reaching out to our customers, broadly categorised into Private sector, Government sector and Ambulances or home births. This is because each of this segment has a different approach to entry and involves different sets of stakeholders.
The Global maternity market is expected to cross 5B dollars with a CAGR of 2.1% by 2023, which increases our opportunity to reach more markets and save more women. We are targeting Government Hospitals,Ambulances , Home deliveries.Our customers include pregnant women, nurses, Asha workers, and the people involved in doing deliveries. We also have doctors, gynaecologists, rural healthcare systems, and multispecialty hospitals as our customer segment.
We have a diverse range of engineers, designers who are guided by clinicians and advisors from different backgrounds. Our team lead Veena Venu is an electronics engineer who has a background of bachelors of technology in Electronics communication Engineering and paired up with our co-founder Sai Mukthevi who is a mechanical engineer with 10 years experience working on Aircraft seating systems. Our team lead founder and CEO of BirthTech Innovations also has experience of working in multiple startups and is a part of several product launches over a period of 4 years now. These two people have a team that includes other professionals from design backgrounds and engineering backgrounds to have a better understanding, to have a well designed and engineered product. We also understand that developing medical devices is different from any other product. Thus it needs inputs from the clinical and as well also user input or user feedback is an important criteria while designing medical devices. Thus we have ensured that we have taken user feedback right from stage one of our product development and have been taking user inputs and getting regular inputs from the users including the midwives, the pregnant mothers, the doctors and clinicians involved in delivery and well renowned gynaecologist and obstetricians. All these inputs have been included at every stage of our product development to make our product more user friendly, user adaptable and helping the right need of the user. Thus we have onboard clinicians and clinical advisors from both private and public hospitals in Hyderabad and other parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. We have also scientific advisors with a background of decade long experience of developing orthotic products and Gynae products.
We as a team of engineers have visited multiple hospitals and with the help our on board clinical advisors we have visited multiple hospitals and clinical settings both from private and public hospitals to understand the user requirement and we are now in the MVP stage of our product where we are developing a product which rightly fits into the community we are addressing which is pregnant women both from public and private sector versions of our product i.e both from the underprivileged backgrounds and from the fast forward economies.
We have our design of the product and implementation of the product meeting the right needs of both the sectors as discussed above. We have our company’s vision is to provide complete setup for pregnant mother irrespective of her socio economic and geographic conditions ensuring that she has support and care without any iteration irrespective of her condition at right and affordable cost, ensuring that she is safe and comfortable throughout the delivery process and the doctor has enough sufficient resources to connects the delivery along with the safety of the baby
- Other
- India
- Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model, but which is not yet serving anyone
We are currently in the pre-revenue stage, redesigning our minimum viable product and as per the requirements of the medical standards and as per the final user feedback we got for the working prototype. We will then move on to the EMI/EMC testings and basic electrical safety testings, which are the two basic standard testings mandatory for the launch of the product into the Indian market. Once our product complies with these two tests as per the regulatory requirements, we will continue with the medical device-specific standard test, which is as per the standards of IEC 60601-2-52.
While conducting the standard testings we are parallelly planning to get an ISO 13485 certificate will again make us a certified manufacturer only after which we can sell the product legally in the market. So once we have cleared all these regulatory tests as per the requirements and have the ISO13485 certificate we are planning to partner with our collaborator, who is a certified manufacturer of labour beds as per ISO13485 and we are also planning to have clinical trials done in the partnered hospitals in Hyderabad and other parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Thus we will be ready to launch our product into the market with all the clinical trial reports, testing reports, and manufacturing and sale licences required legally to sell in the Indian market.
We are thus having a roadmap of 12 to 18 months from now to complete all these tests and will be ready for the launch of our product. Thus we are planning to launch our product into the market by the end of 2024. Once we have all these test reports submitted, we are also planning to go for CE marking of the product because we understand that is a golden standard for the medical devices in India and other European countries and want to comply with those standards as well.
On the other hand, we have LoIs already with the hospitals where we have clinical advisors and in the partnered hospitals in India, from parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. So once we have all these specific regulatory and clinical requirements ready and launch our product, we will then turn the LoIs into valuable customers who will be our first set of customers and will give proper user feedback and will help us enter into the market easily. So this way will make market entry and market penetration easy and in a fast manner.
Then we are also planning to participate in campaigns in social marketing to spread the word about our revolutionary product like ours, where we can sell our product on a large scale. We are also planning to visit the larger hospital chains to get a bigger order of our product and to expand the market in the Indian market meanwhile we are working on expanding the market into other countries like Canada and other European countries with CE regulatory compliance and the North American markets with FDA compliance. Thus we have CE regulatory compliance and FDA clearance in our roadmap ahead. Thus we will parallelly expand in the Indian sub-continent and other European and American parts of the world. Thus, 2 years from now we will be completing the CE marking, will be applying for the FDA, and will have our product in the majority of the markets with our collaborators and distributors across the globe.
We are currently in the pre revenue stage and have LOI’s from hospitals of Hyderabad and other places of Andhra pradesh and Telangana. Once we are in the market, we will turn the LOIs into customers. These LOI’s have been retended from the past one year and they have believed us since the company has started. We are continuing to build relationships with them and deliver a high-quality product that meets their needs in order to turn these LOIs into actual customers. We will also continue exploring potential partnerships and customer relationships to diversify your customer base and reduce risk. This may involve attending trade shows, networking events, and conferences to connect with potential customers and partners in your industry.
We are looking for funding support to tap the European and American markets
- Monitoring & Evaluation (e.g. collecting/using data, measuring impact)
- Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)