Patient engagement solutions needs more focus: mTatva

BANGALORE, INDIA: According to Frost and Sullivan, India's healthcare information technology market is expected to hit US$1.45 billion in 2018, more than three times the US$381.3 million reached in 2012 and this is mainly due to fast adoption of technology by stake-holders.

City based mTatva is an unique primary healthcare IT start-up, which builds simple yet innovative technology products that enables quality and efficient healthcare for all. mTatva's solutions focus on making primary healthcare accessible and affordable. It is no brainer that India has huge shortage of doctors and other medical staff. mTatva is working on using technology to solve this differently by increasing the medical literacy and improving OPD yield/efficiency. Improving medical literacy goes long way in reducing morbidity as well as making patient's recover faster than usual. mTatva mission is to save 1 day every year for billion lives using innovative technologies.

In an interaction with CIOL's Sharath Kumar, Baljit Singh, CEO, mTatva shares his insights on the health care information market and his companies innovative products. Excerpts:

CIOL: How do you see the Healthcare ecosystem in India?

Baljit Singh: The Health Care Ecosystem in India, needs significant transformation to enable it to better manage the numerous demographic and lifestyle changes that India is currently undergoing. At present, India spends close to 4.1% of its GDP on healthcare, out of which 60% amounts to private spending towards primary care, which is close to USD 50 Billion last year.
Currently the Primary Health care in India is in disease management stage, i.e we tend to go to the hospital or the clinic after we get affected. On the other hand, health care leans a little towards the preventive side. In the Primary Health Care spectrum we have to gradually move from disease management side to healthcare management side and the key to aid this is to raise awareness about the importance of health care among people.

CIOL: How is Information Technology impacting the present healthcare ecosystem in India?

Baljit Singh: We are seeing a continuous rise in use of information technology in healthcare in India. The adoption of IT is largely seen in the following 3 areas : Firstly, in Hospital Information Systems, Lab Information System and Radiology Information System, these integrated information system help in managing, all the aspects of a hospital operation, such as medical, administrative, financial, legal and the corresponding service processing, apart from this there has also been a continuous rise in the use of cloud based appointment management systems in India. Second is around medical devices and wearable devices.

Third, is around patient engagement solutions. There is good amount of work happening in first two areas, but third one is ignored and is not worked in right form as of today.

CIOL: How is mTatva helping to bring a change in the healthcare eco-system? What area the technologies that have been developed?

Baljit Singh: mTatva is trying to solve accessibility and shortage of doctors in a different way. There is huge amount of health related information and care which is left to patient. Since proper tools and services are not available, they end up coming to back to providers and hence increasing the burden further. mTatva's philosophy revolves around reducing the morbidity by two means. First by giving them much needed information and statistics and secondly by empowering them to take care of themselves. This way you are not increasing number of doctors but reducing number of visits needed to see doctor. The other factor we are working on, is to improve the productivity of doctors.

mTatva's flagship product HealthPIE (Patient Information and Empowerment System) empowers patients through use of technology. We are working on simple technologies to reduce medical errors and hence not just reducing the healthcare cost but also reducing the need to visit doctors. HealthPIE empowers patient by giving them ample information pool. For doctors, HealthPIE save's consultation time and hence allows them to see more patients in given amount of time. At the same time, HealthPIE works as a complete end-to-end solution without changing workflows for either doctors or patients.

CIOL: Can you explain us the HealthPIE model. How does it actually work?

Baljit Singh: mTatva's solutions focus on making primary healthcare accessible and affordable. It is no brainer that India has huge shortage of doctors and other medical staff. mTatva is working on using technology to solve this differently by increasing the medical literacy and improving OPD yield/efficiency. Improving medical literacy goes long way in reducing morbidity as well as making patient's recover faster than usual. mTatva mission is to save 1 day every year for billion lives using innovative technologies.
- HealthPIE (Patient Information and Empowerment System), mTatva's flagship product empowers patients and brings in efficiency and flexibility to the present healthcare ecosystem. HealthPIE aims at empowering patient through technology, it enables healthcare providers not just improve the OPD yield but also engage their patients effectively. All this without changing any workflow for either doctor or patient. A simple example of how HealthPIE function is :
o Post the Patient's consultation with the doctor, he receives his prescription on SMS which is a big value to patient as doctor's handwriting is generally not readable. And it is easily referable in future while visiting doctor next time to show him medications you have been taking.
o Also post consultation, the patient receives a document that has information pertaining to the illness/ ailment that they have been diagnosed with and thus educates the patient about his/her illness and medication. The information provided to the patient is written by the doctor however it is seamlessly integrated with technology and made immediately available by mTatva(as (s)he walks out of the consultation room) for the patient for his/her read-through.
o Also, the patient gets information and alerts about his medication intake schedule through text messages ( text alerts).
o Further, all the medical records (diagnosis report, prescriptions, etc.) of the patients are saved on cloud, enabling the patients secure, 24X7 access of their medical records, anywhere, anytime. So now when they (patients) are travelling and if they fall ill, they do not have to worry as to how they can procure their past medical history or get information about the last medication they took, etc. Online medical records can be used to do seamless second opinion.
o Tele-follow-up solution will enable patients and doctors to further save time with its integration with diagnostics.
- Further mTatva's solutions enables hospitals to fully integrate their systems, provides more shareable information platforms, and standardization that could lead to user-friendliness, more usability, and access to mobile devices such as tablets, as well as advanced tools uptake like telemedicine and virtual meeting systems for knowledge sharing.
5. Can you tell us about the number of tie-ups with hospitals. How many patients are benefiting for your offerings?
- Currently we are tied-up with a Telerad RXDX muti specialty clinic in Whitefield Bangalore. At Telerad, we are serving about 1200 patients every day. At We partner with the hospitals and give them enabling services to not just improve the OPD yield but also enhance patient experience significantly.