CXO Insights: Aneesh Nair, Co-Founder & CIO of MyHealthcare

MyHealthcare is a health tech company launched in 2017. The ecosystem helps in building a structured repository of a patient’s clinical data and a patient longitudinal history, across all interventions and services offered through the MyHealthcare Ecosystem. This ecosystem includes the Patient Platform, Homecare Platform, Hospital Platform, and the MyHealthcare Enterprise Application.

Aneesh Nair is the CIO, Co-Founder at MyHealthcare, recognised as an industry legend for creating new value systems and innovation for business, Aneesh continues to seek innovations for ground-breaking strategies to drive growth.

As an entrepreneurial technology leader and an information security practitioner, Aneesh has a track record of planning, building, and scaling successful internet businesses. He has over two decades of experience leading Infotech while heading the automation and implementation of systems for large enterprises, hospitals, and factories.

In a recent chat with Aneesh Nair the CIO, Co-Founder at MyHealthcare, He talks about how MyHealthcare is actively working towards building its ecosystem in preparedness for the third wave. Here is all you need to know.

Introduction - (A brief non-promotional profile)

 MyHealthcare is a specialty health tech startup launched in 2017. We are a digital healthcare ecosystem providing enhanced patient care outcomes by improving healthcare delivery services. Backed by a patient-centric, data-driven philosophy, we offer services such as doctor consultation, telemedicine, diagnostics, health monitoring, home care services, care programs, preventive health packages, and more. Increased patient engagement and better commercial value are at the core of our efforts. Our digital healthcare system is delivered as a B2B and B2B2C platform, while working with some leading healthcare institutions such as Max Hospital, Fortis Hospital, BLK Super Speciality, Breach Candy, PSRI, and Aakash Healthcare, and many others are a part of our platform.

What was the idea behind creating MyHealthcare?

 India ranks 150 among 195 countries in terms of quality and accessibility of healthcare. The second challenge we face is the lack of meaningful patient information, which leads to diagnosis errors or increases the timeline for accurate diagnosis.

MyHealthcare provides an effective digital healthcare ecosystem, which enhances access to healthcare delivery, with a vision to provide quality healthcare for all.

MyHealthcare works with hospitals, its doctors, and caregivers and enhances the patient care continuum processes. Our core focus is to bridge the healthcare delivery gap using data-driven care processes. As a service offering MyHealthcare is designed to assist hospitals and clinics in building out their patient engagement and scaling their digital healthcare roadmap.

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 360-degree care to its patients from anywhere and at all times.

Currently, we are working with 100+ leading hospitals and 7500+ doctors in India and managing over 24 million patients across our ecosystem.

Do you think that it helped patients in Pandemic during lockdowns?

 The last couple of years has been a defining time for the healthcare sector. The importance of technology, more specifically the use of digital technology in the healthcare sector was brought to the fore. With lockdowns enforced, OPDs and hospital services closed – the use of digital solutions such as virtual consults, and telemedicine services became game changers across the healthcare sector.

The healthcare providers are adapting to the digital journey through digitization of the medical records, automating manual processes, leveraging data analytics, and implementing AI/ML/RPO/IoMT to enhance personalized care and patient experiences.

While both patients and doctors struggled at the beginning, both have now learned and adopted the channel as one of the primary channels of care delivery.  The pandemic presented us with a whole lot of challenges and digital technologies played a key role in supporting our healthcare ecosystem in those crisis times.

With mobility becoming a severe constraint during that time, MyHealthcare extended virtual consults, diagnostics at home, home care, home isolation management, and pharmacy at home into their common care ecosystem.  Safety and convenience are the two major factors driving virtual consultations. The patient and their families had access to doctors from India’s leading hospitals and were able to manage all their care needs from the MyHealthcare app which has built-in trackers for monitoring alerts of the patient's vitals outside the permissible range. All home care/home isolation patients were managed from a single command center by the hospital.

Did the Covid-19 Pandemic accelerate the growth of the platform?

 There had been a significant increase in demand for virtual consultations, and homecare/ home isolation services during the pandemic especially under the national lockdowns when OPDs, etc were shut. Digital platforms like MyHealthcare witnessed a significant increase in demand for virtual consultations and diagnostic services. Doctors had been doing virtual consults till midnight, 7 days a week, to keep up with the patient load. It is incredible how they managed to stay up on their toes and provide services during crisis times. With time online consultations did increase and have helped us push technological innovations for better diagnosis and treatment. COVID-19 has focused on both patient-centric and healthcare providers for the digital healthcare solutions. Technological innovations during the pandemic that included telehealth, AI, big data analytics, blockchain, big data, machine learning, and loT were life savers in more ways than one.

Do you have any partnerships with healthcare products & services providers?

 We have multiple partnerships across our offerings. Our diagnostics partners include Metropolis, Healthians, Redcliffe, and Dr. Lal Path Labs. Our pharmacy partners include PharmEasy and 1mg.

For patient monitoring, we have partnered with Omron (blood pressure and pulse rate), AliveCor KardiaMobile (ECG and heart rate), and Blood Sugar monitoring devices from Accu-Chek and more are on the way. We recently collaborated with Sakra Hospital to accelerate its digital transformation journey with the launch of the Sakra Patient Mobile App. This helped Sakra Premium Clinic and Sakra Homecare Services improve the healthcare management of their patients by using technology innovations like clinical analytics and timely clinical alerts to deliver better patient care outcomes. By adopting our specialty care EMR solutions, with built-in AI solutions such as voice-based CPOE and AI-enabled CDSS, they are able to deliver personalized healthcare services to their patients.

Another defining milestone partnership that we closed was with Ashoka University to help build evidence-based clinical research across hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes. MyHealthcare partnership aims to research and build clinical models that will help deliver better care outcomes. It will also deepen the research and help catalyze the growth and awareness around preventive medicine. Through this partnership, MyHealthcare would be assisting  Ashoka University by providing structured real-world data, ready for interdisciplinary clinical research studies that are relevant to the Indian population.

What kind of services does the platform offer that makes it different from its competitors?

MyHealthcare is a digital specialty healthcare ecosystem that offers an integrated care delivery platform, bringing hospitals, healthcare service providers, doctors, and patients into a unified ecosystem. The platform brings together the hospital, its doctors, nurses, allied services, health records, pharmacy, and home care services to offer one-tap care to patients.

For patients, MyHealthcare helps in building a complete patient longitudinal history, whereby all medical records, and clinical history of a patient are created and managed centrally. To manage a patient from diagnosis to cure, MyHealthcare maps the patient journey from booking an appointment, the consult with the doctor physically or virtually, delivering the e-prescription, delivering services such as diagnostics or pharmacy or homecare services, follow-up consults or referrals, all delivered within the ecosystem. Patients are empowered to manage their healthcare needs through a seamless Personal Health Record (PHR) platform, and health trackers through integrations with wearables, smartwatches, and IoT devices.

For doctors and care providers, the ecosystem enhances their efficiency with our Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which has been designed and developed by clinicians. The use of augmented intelligence and AI-based voice-to-text functionalities, contribute to delivering a faster and more accurate diagnosis to the cure platform. Administrative functions are reduced through automation and data-driven frameworks such as clinical decision support systems, polypharmacy & drug reaction alert to help improve the quality of diagnosis.

Remote patient monitoring integrated with the EMR helps in creating a care continuum ecosystem. We are on a path to creating a complete remote patient monitoring platform through device integrations, where real-time data from the clinical devices are delivered to the patient and the clinical team on the EMR. Today we can track vitals such as temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, pulse rate, blood oxygenation (SPO2) and blood sugar in real-time, with vital alerts that trigger an alarm at the clinical command center to help timely intervention.

MyHealthcare has also announced the launch of India’s first single-screen EMR, a system that allows doctors, and clinicians to enter all medical records of a patient encounter on a single screen. This system would aim to help doctors experience a more efficient and painless approach to delivering value-based care by offering an EMR platform that would promise fewer clicks, faster workflows, and the ability to truly work on one screen.

How has the Healthcare industry responded to the change?

It is a known fact that digitisation and adoption of digital technology solutions have been laggard in India. With COVID- 19, there has been a rapid growth in digitisation and penetration of mobile internet which has been a huge game changer for the Indian healthcare industry. There has also been an increase in the improvement in data bandwidth speed, reducing the cost of digital hardware, and improvements in cloud technology which has significantly changed the healthcare sector. Digital health solutions have helped enhance access to healthcare services to patients and made it much more easier and accessible.  The significant benefit has been the opportunity for healthcare ecosystems to serve all health needs of a customer, be it consulting, pharmacy delivery, diagnostics at home, home healthcare, and remote patient monitoring.

Start-ups like MyHealthcare  have been the drivers of this digital healthcare evolution. In recent years tech giants such as Google, Apple, Samsung and others are pushing a whole new gamut of digital health applications for monitoring heart rates, ECG, blood oxygenation, blood pressure, pulse rate, and blood sugar levels.

Going forward, the digitisation of health records will help immensely in the accuracy of diagnosis, building patient longitudinal history, reducing medical administration errors, and offering timely warnings, and alerts to prevent severe medical crises.

Do you think digital is the future of health and wellness? If yes, why so?

 Yes, digital is going to be the future of health and wellness in the coming years. The last two years of the pandemic have proved to be a stressful time for the healthcare sector. The importance of technology, more specifically the use of digital technology in the healthcare sector has been brought to the forefront. With lockdowns enforced, OPDs and hospital services closed – the use of digital solutions such as virtual consults, and telemedicine services became game changers across the healthcare sector. While both patients and doctors struggled at the beginning, both gradually learned and adopted the channel as one of the primary mediums of care delivery.

Hospitals and doctors who at first hesitated using telemedicine for a multitude of reasons soon realised its advantages and built services around it. India’s telemedicine market is expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2025, spurred by a rise in teleconsultations, telepathology, teleradiology, and e-pharmacy due to the pandemic, this has resulted in significant growth in the number of telemedicine platforms in India specifically health-tech startups like ours who are using technology at their core to bridge the healthcare delivery gap.

MyHealthcare is a platform that is built around the needs and requirements of patients, doctors, and caregivers and allows them to engage seamlessly, taking advantage of the latest technology offerings, including AI solutions. The future of the Indian healthcare sector in the coming times would change with the introduction of data mining, digital health records, and digital infrastructure.

Could you tell us about your expansion plans? What is in the pipeline for MyHealthcare?

MyHealthcare is one of India’s largest healthcare systems for specialty care in India. 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 focussed on becoming a healthcare utility platform, delivering quality healthcare to an extensive patient base.

As the MyHealthcare Ecosystem is now a full-stack healthcare platform, we have started working towards deploying the ecosystem across Asia and Middle East markets.

Technology innovation will be core to our growth - across our AI-based offerings and process automation across clinical and administrative operations for our care providers.