MyHealthcare is leveraging digital technologies to bridge the care delivery gaps across the country: Divya Laroyia, MyHealthcare
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Divya Laroyia (Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at MyHealthcare)
- Could you give us an overview of the MyHealthcare platform?
MyHealthcare is focused on leveraging the potential of digital technology to bridge the care delivery gaps using data-driven care processes to make healthcare accessible across the country. Our digital healthcare system is presented as a B2B and B2B2C platform, working with leading hospitals, clinics, diagnostics service providers, e-pharmacies, homecare providers, and clinical device companies to build an integrated healthcare ecosystem. We leverage internet penetration, digital technology, AI, and cloud technology to increase the accessibility of quality healthcare and make it more efficient. Our contribution to democratize healthcare in India has also been recognised by NASSCOM.
MyHealthcare has partnered with leading hospitals and healthcare institutions in building a meaningful and effective healthcare ecosystem, mapping best practices in clinical treatment and integrating into the various technology platforms of a hospital to help deliver a 360-degree care to its patients from anywhere and at all times. Currently we are working with 125+ leading hospitals and 7500+ doctors in India and managing over 25 million patients across our ecosystem.
The MyHealthcare Enterprise ecosystem is designed to help hospitals and healthcare institutions to drive efficiency and improve healthcare delivery. The enterprise ecosystem integrates multiple provider platforms and helps hospitals expand their geography of care. The platform is built on an open source, microservices, cloud-based architecture, helps reduce operating and technology costs for hospitals. The enterprise system is built with a workflow management process and a task-based interface. Our focus has been to deliver a single screen user experience for hospital operation users, single screen EMR for doctors, clinicians, and nurses. All of this helps digitalise healthcare delivery, across all care delivery touchpoints such as OP, IP, ER, care at home and healthcare centres.
- What are some of the challenges that hospitals face today and how does MyHealthcare help in addressing them?
The biggest challenge faced in digitisation and digitalisation of hospitals is making the shift from their legacy systems. Bringing EMR solutions in clinical operations of a running hospital means a significant change management initiative – this is probably one of the toughest for any provider and requires an investment, not just financial but also in terms of personnel bandwidth and adoption at all levels. This can be addressed through extensive training and bringing forth the advantages of digitization and digitalisation and how this shift will optimise care delivery.
3.What impact has the implementation of MyHealthcare’s digital ecosystem had on patient health outcomes and overall accessibility to care in India?
The MyHealthcare Enterprise Ecosystem is designed to help hospitals and healthcare institutions to drive efficiency and improve the efficacy of healthcare delivery. The enterprise ecosystem integrates across multiple provider platforms and helps deliver quality care, across a wider geography. Our ecosystem creates a centralized patient history where all patient records are managed under one central system. When a patient seeks medical advice, the patient’s extensive medical history aids in a quicker and more precise diagnosis. The ecosystem has doctors, nurses, and other caregivers all operating in one place. The EMR has integrated automation and enhanced intelligence that maps diagnosis, treatment regimens, and our voice.ai in order to increase efficiency (voice dictation based order entry). Our team works continuously to improve the EMR as the workload on doctors is growing by the day.
The MyHealthcare Patient Ecosystem is built to provide patients across India, easy access to quality healthcare allowing them to utilize the mobile app to book virtual consults with specialists from top hospitals, lab tests, order prescription medications, book homecare services and avail many more services with the tap of a button, from the comfort of their homes.
- Take us through your partnerships?
Through our collaborations with partners like Sakra World Hospital, we aim to deploy our primary care ecosystem, that helps in using digital solutions such as the Sakra patient app, the MyHealthcare EMR, homecare & diagnostics platforms to deliver 360-degree patient care, within the hospital and at a patient’s home. The integrated, digital care ecosystem from MyHealthcare helped Sakra World Hospital, Sakra Premium Clinic and Sakra Homecare Services enhance patient engagement and delivery of care services by using technology innovations like clinical analytics and timely clinical alerts, to deliver better patient care outcomes. The Sakra app and patient portal empowers patients to manage their healthcare needs and serves as a single window to manage the health of their families.
It is well known that we have an acute shortage of doctors, specialists, nurses, radiologists, etc in India. With our population gap, this demand – supply mismatch will widen in the years ahead. We believe that technology enabled healthcare delivery is the only path in bridging this gap. Standardisation of care delivery, accurate and timely diagnosis are key elements to improve the overall healthcare of Indians. Our partnership with Ashoka University is to set up programmes that will help build evidence-based care path flows as well as work towards building a clinical registry for India. Using the MyHealthcare clinical care ecosystem, we aim to use the partnership with Ashoka and our hospital network to deliver improved quality of care, to a wider population.
Late last year, MyHealthcare also partnered with Paras Hospital as their Digital Transformation partner. Through this partnership, we aim to enhance patient experience and clinical delivery, through effective digital technology across all care delivery processes. The deployment of the MyHealthcare Enterprise Application aids in delivering operational efficiency, centralized management of its healthcare operations and delivery of better clinical outcomes using the most advanced Electronic Health Record (EMR) ecosystem.
At MyHealthcare we are aware that no single platform can manage all the healthcare needs of a patient. We are working constantly to expand our clinical and patient engagement partnerships, to build a valuable digital healthcare system for India.
- Recently, MyHealthcare partnered with Paras Hospital. How has the partnership helped enhance patient experience and clinical delivery at the hospital?
Paras Hospitals are present across seven or eight cities for now and they are planning to expand further. The biggest advantage of this partnership would be if a patient is moving across cities, the patient data will also move with him/her since it is stored on cloud. The patient will not have to carry along their clinical information which will be available across with the other clinicians sitting in another city while the patient is consulting them. This will make it easy for clinicians to deliver their diagnosis to prognosis. Also, in terms of enhancing patient experience Paras through the patient app powered by MyHealthcare will be able to provide a seamless patient experience across their hospital chain.
- The use of AI in the healthcare industry comes with numerous concerns as well. Do you have any use cases where you are using AI?
While usage of Artificial Intelligence in our applications, brings many benefits; we are aware that there are also potential risks that can crop up with un-supervised AI. The way we use AI (Augmented Intelligence) is to augment the capabilities of doctors and healthcare professional and never used as a tool for replacing doctors. We always ensure there is a Human in loop for all decision-making processes, where AI is involved. Further by design, we ensure the ethics and fairness consideration are part of our Machine Learning model, so as to avoid any potential errors and bias towards the decision-making process. By carefully managing the potential risks and taking steps to mitigate them, we ensure that AI deployed through our applications systems are used safely and effectively.
- Can you shed light on some of the healthcare trends for 2023?
The Indian healthcare sector is going to witness a significant digital evolution over the next 4-5 years, across both private and public healthcare delivery. Digitisation of healthcare across India, through government-led initiatives such as the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), will help improve the quality of care delivery.
Over the next 18 months, the Indian healthcare sector will see a shift from digitisation to digitalisation of the healthcare delivery process. Care providers such as hospitals will push for EMR adoption, to help track the quality of care and in time, be able to deliver value based care to Indians.
However, one has to recognise that the greatest catalyst of digitalisation of Indian healthcare is going to be the start-up ecosystem. Indian start-ups will be the greatest disruptors in changing the status quo, and leading innovation across health-tech, pharma and pave the way with IoMT devices, data analytics and AI – driving towards the growth of technology enabled health.
- What are the future plans of MyHealthcare in the next 3-5 years?
We are working towards making MyHealthcare one of India’s largest healthcare systems, for specialty care. Over the next 24 months we plan to expand our geography of care by growing our network of partner hospitals, diagnostics & home care service providers across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. We are confident that MyHealthcare will become a healthcare utility platform, delivering quality healthcare to an extensive patient base.
Over the next 3-5 years, we hope to expand MyHealthcare across Asia, Middle East and western markets such as US, Canada and Europe.
