Startup Circle: How is Navia Life Care changing the Tele Medicine sector in India?

Telehealth has widened the use of virtual visits to support a wide range of specialities that manage chronic illness. The pandemic has made each speciality doctor rethink how they conduct appointments. Many aspects of chronic disease prevention and management can be handled via video from a patient’s home or from rural hospitals connecting with larger healthcare systems because of telehealth. Because of COVID-19, telehealth is one of the top health sectors yielding a high patient satisfaction score. Although it has been around for years, it has seen its biggest usage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Navia life care being one such startup has seen tremendous growth in telemedicine in the pandemic. Its Co-founder Mr Gaurav Gupta shares more insights on the startup.

What is Navia Life Care about? Tell us about the team.

Navia Life Care is a healthcare technology startup that offers smart solutions to healthcare providers.

How did you come up with the idea?

Navia Life Care was started by Kunal Kishore Dhawan and Gaurav Gupta in 2016. Prior to starting Navia, they worked together on a couple of pharma consulting projects, having a background in healthcare and life sciences. Coming from families with chronic disease patients, and having studied and worked in the field, starting a company in the healthcare industry was a natural decision while making a difference to the ecosystem was a collective passion. More recently, Nupur Khandelwal joined Navia as a co-founder and has been an integral part of the functioning of the company since.

What is the importance of mental health in this pandemic?

Mental health plays a very crucial role in fighting COVID-19. Owing to the pandemic, many countries including India have implemented various social distancing measures. This had lead to disruptions in the daily routine of people. Mostly, because all are restricted from even stepping out of their houses. The trauma and stress of various kinds owing to the lockdown has affected all age groups from all walks of life; from school going kids to adolescents, to working-class people to senior citizens.

The pandemic has brought great socio-economic uncertainties, giving rise to increased anxiety, depression, addiction, and suicide the world over. Luckily with the availability of technology, e-mental health is an area open to reach out for help. Given the current scenario, tele-psychotherapy has proved to be particularly salient in times such as the Covid-19 pandemic when access to in-person psychotherapy sessions is limited and stress levels may be high.

How are you giving help online? Is it secure?

Healthcare in India faces the growing challenges of access and affordability. Technology has the ability to address the needs of providers and change the dynamic of health care delivery. In recent times, digital health in India has significantly moved from ‘Good to have’ to ‘Must have’. Digital health makes quality healthcare affordable in hard-to-reach areas. Through the Internet connection, anyone can access health services and always be connected to the professional to resolve concerns.

The professional can store all the information quickly, access it whenever he wants, and share it with the patient or other health professionals. The data will allow making very accurate reports, contrast the patient’s progress, and make clinical decisions more easily. Digital technologies lead to greater patient empowerment and adherence to treatment thanks to the biofeedback they receive in real-time. This is a completely secure service that is hosted on dedicated virtual servers (AWS) located in India only. These servers follow HIPAA guidelines. In addition to secure servers, all our web-based communication is SSL encrypted.

What is your business/market growth?

We, at Navia, were very quick in understanding the changing needs of the doctors and patients due to the lockdown and other restrictions because of COVID-19. Navia emerged as a leading telemedicine and EMR company which helped. We received a stellar response from both doctors and patients who actively took up the use of Navia’s products which helped them in continued medical care during these difficult times. Now, we are present in more than 400 cities with more than 8000 doctors on the platform. We have thousands of patients who are being benefited from the platform on a daily basis.

The pandemic has affected every sector. How are you coping?

As the lockdown was enforced in the last week of March, the patients, both chronically ill and acute, were in an immediate flux because of a lack of mobility and unavailability of the doctors. Along with this, there was a fear of nosocomial infections. Video consultation emerged as a viable option and provided the patients with a seamless OPD-like experience with their doctors. The government of India published the telemedicine guidelines on 25th March, this helped in instilling confidence in doctors and patients to use telemedicine as a viable option and we have seen thousands of consultations happening on our platform since.

We are focused on creating value for the healthcare ecosystem. At this time of need, our team is working round the clock to understand user behaviour for both doctors and patients so as to make it easier for them to communicate using our telemedicine platform.

The use of technology is not new for our doctors but during their everyday practice, the doctors are used to seeing the patients in person. We are trying to make this transition easier for both the doctors and patients by hand-holding them at every step.

What are your Post-Covid plans?

Navia has an ambitious vision for itself to achieve by 2025. We wish to enable more than 250 thousand doctors and over 200 million patients in over 10 countries by our digital health platforms. Further, we envision an ecosystem where patient care and patient outcomes are the primary objectives; information is available to all the stakeholders to achieve these objectives. We see us playing a central role in this ecosystem by enabling data generation and data sharing among these stakeholders.