A healthcare app that lastly works? Driving on Ayushman Bharat, DRiefcase says it could ship

Everybody takes care of their well being, only a few individuals deal with their well being information. Harsh Parikh and Sohit Kapoor have had private experiences of coping with lacking health records that created loads of avoidable points and stress for his or her households. In contrast to within the US, the place the community of the medical insurance supplier maintains the medical information of sufferers, in India, the one aggregator of medical information is the affected person herself.Given their private experiences and the will to assist digitise healthcare in India, the duo determined to construct a user-centric private well being locker, DRiefcasein late 2015 and launched it in early 2017. This was after careers as funding bankers at Financial institution of America-Merrill Lynch the place every spent practically a decade.

Kapoor is a pc engineer from Mumbai College and an MBA from IIM-Bangalore. At Financial institution of America-Merrill Lynch, he led the company finance, M&A & monetary sponsors protection groups. Parikh is a chartered accountant and an MBA from IIM-Bangalore. His position at BoA-ML concerned masking shoppers throughout client items, constructing supplies, metals & mining sectors. Aside from being colleagues, they’d studied and labored collectively. So their relationship of practically 20 years was a pure bond to their entrepreneurial affiliation additionally.

Parikh says DRiefcase is an entire health-tech platform anchored on the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM). “The ABDM, a key mission of PM Narendra Modi, is a well being info superhighway that connects everybody related to affected person care, with express affected person consent. So, if you’re consulting a physician at a hospital and the physician desires to entry a well being check-up performed at another lab, it may be performed with a click on,” Parikh says.

DRiefcase has constructed ABDM-focused options for sufferers, medical doctors, and healthcare in addition to insurance coverage enterprises.

“Firstly, DRiefcase is India’s first ABDM permitted PHR (private well being information) app. Customers can handle their total ABDM journey by way of DRiefcase – create ABHA, register with hospitals by way of QR code, consent dealing with and well being information administration. If ABDM is the UPI of healthcare, then DRiefcase is the Google Pay,” says Kapoor.

Then there’s DRiefcase Join, an ABDM built-in observe administration resolution for medical doctors. This platform acts as an ABDM gateway for particular person medical doctors, polyclinics and small hospitals and helps them enhance productiveness and handle their observe.

The chance

Parikh says the implications of actually linked digital healthcare are immense. Higher high quality of care, superior affected person expertise, cheaper and sooner insurance coverage processing, and finally common well being protection.

“We have now seen the transformative impact of UPI over the previous few years. We imagine ABDM will probably be much more transformative than UPI. The success of ABDM is dependent upon adoption by numerous stakeholders, with sufferers being the important thing factor right here. PHR apps (like DRiefcase) have an amazing alternative as they may play a important position in connecting the affected person to the ABDM,” he says.

Kapoor says quite a few healthcare apps present customers the performance to retailer their medical information. However they count on the consumer to place in all of the arduous work. So these apps by no means take off.

“We supplied customers with a number of straightforward choices to add their information (e mail, WhatsApp, courier pickup and bodily scanning at dwelling). Additional, with our proprietary indexing function, customers may discover any file of their account in lower than 10 seconds. Given our understanding of the area, the architects of ABDM invited us to assist them design components of the ABDM framework,” says Kapoor.

What additionally helps customers is that DRiefcase has developed a proprietary technique of scanning X-Ray and MRI movies in a low-cost method. This enables customers to retailer not solely the stories but additionally the movies of their DRiefcase well being locker.

Refusing to reveal the numbers, Parikh says DRiefcase had minimal revenues final 12 months. In response to Tofler, the corporate clocked about Rs 4 lakh in revenues within the 12 months ended March 31, 2022 — a 65% rise from a 12 months in the past.

Ease of use for subscribers
Ready in a queue to get the physician’s appointment at a Navi Mumbai Hospital not too long ago for her relative’s checkup, Kavita Kelkar observed a board that learn “scan-and-share” for fast-track OPD registration. “I used to be curious to learn about it so enquired on the desk and that’s once I occurred to learn about DRiefcase. I put in it and realised it is time saving, as you needn’t stand within the lengthy OPD queue. You’ll be able to simply scan the QR code on the hospital and it’s performed,” says Kelkar.

Kelkar, who suffers from thyroid for a few years, says managing her well being information was an actual problem. “With a number of physician visits, lab stories, and drugs adjustments each few months, it was tough to maintain all my well being information organised. However the DRiefcase app made life straightforward for me. I’ve been utilizing the app for a while now and I discover it very useful as a result of all my household’s well being information are actually saved on DRiefcase and may be simply accessed with only a few faucets on my telephone,” she says.

Bullish on Ayushman Bharat
DRiefcase is a free app and is obtainable on PlayStore and AppStore. Customers can create their ABHA in three fast steps. DRiefcase additionally has an on-ground group in among the largest hospitals throughout India. This group helps sufferers get onboarded on ABDM and use the QR code-based quick OPD registration service that has been launched in round 500 hospitals throughout India.

The founders are assured ABDM will rework healthcare in India and have aligned the enterprise in direction of India’s digital well being mission. “The primary public use case of ABDM, the QR code-based quick OPD registration, was launched round November 2022 and in a short span of six months, DRiefcase has onboarded greater than 1,000,000 customers. Additional, our ABDM Connector is getting a really constructive response and numerous massive and small enterprises have proven a robust curiosity in it,” says Parikh.

Sandip Ok Rane, Interventional Heart specialist, Founder Mumbai Coronary heart Clinic, and Promoter-Director Asian Coronary heart Institute, says he was significantly impressed with the best way DRiefcase Join might help enhance affected person care and handle hospital workflow. “For instance, the platform permits medical doctors to simply entry affected person information, which might help them make higher diagnoses and remedy selections. Moreover, DRiefcase Join might help medical doctors talk extra successfully with sufferers, which may result in improved affected person satisfaction.”

Rane says he has seen a big affect on his work the place workflow has not solely been streamlined, however has additionally ensured that the hospital has a digital file of all paperwork and movies. “We have now a imaginative and prescient of being India’s first paperless hospital, and DRiefcase helps us obtain that objective,” says Rane.

Digitisation of healthcare in India is just not a brand new phenomenon. Varied corporations have tried to digitise elements of healthcare. There have been good ends in some elements–physician discovery, e-pharmacy, teleconsulting. Another elements haven’t proven a lot enchancment.

“All of the previous efforts have largely been siloed and pushed by particular person corporations. ABDM is altering that. Healthcare digitisation is now a nationwide mission backed by the federal government. We imagine that this augurs properly for the ecosystem and we’ll see fast developments within the digital healthcare area in India,” says Kapoor.

Digital medical information and high quality of care
The founders say higher entry to a affected person’s medical historical past helps well being care professionals throughout disciplines prescribe extra applicable and efficient interventions. Additional, distant monitoring of affected person well being and continuity of care can result in vital enchancment in productiveness of medical doctors and nurses–necessary for a rustic like India the place many areas have extraordinarily low per capita availability of healthcare professionals.

In response to Parikh, probably the most positive aspects that healthcare professionals could make from well being knowledge is within the improvement of synthetic intelligence to help medical doctors in higher choice making. “The largest problem but to be overcome in large-scale implementation of AI in healthcare is the provision of statistically related knowledge in every potential consequence to reach at any prognosis scientifically. Whereas use of AI as a decision-making software has made some head-way in sure therapeutic areas, now we have solely scratched the floor on its potential to assist predict outcomes and improve the effectiveness of remedies,” he says.

Enterprise of well being
DRiefcase says the primary 3-4 years of its journey was spent in constructing the marketplace for well being lockers. “For the final 3 years, now we have been targeted on ABDM. On this interval, now we have built-in three options in ABDM. Right now, DRiefcase PHR app has over 1.2 million customers. Additional, our ABDM connector has powered two enterprises of their ABDM journey,” says Parikh.

DRiefcase has three major income streams proper now: the PHR app that gives healthcare providers for customers, DRiefcase Join that has a subscription payment from medical doctors and the ABDM Connector, which expenses a licensing payment from enterprises.

Parikh says there’s robust curiosity within the ABDM Connector. With the corporate planning to launch healthcare providers like e-pharmacy and labs by integrating companions on DRiefcase, it’s concentrating on a strong income build-up within the present 12 months.