We need to completely democratise and demonetise healthcare. Innov4sight is trying to achieve the same

Started in 2014, Innov4Sight (I4S) is a start up with a vision and mission to create a ‘technology agnostic integrated healthcare ecosystem’ that will improve clinical outcomes in fertility and cancer care. Vijayagopal R, Founder and CEO of INNOV4SIGHT Health and Biomedical Systems, divulges the growth plans of the company and its strategy to achieve them

Which are the major areas of healthcare influenced by technology? How has it empowered the stakeholders of healthcare to be more empowered?

Areas like biotechnology, pharma, information technology, the development of medical devices and equipment, Medical Nanobots, Genetics and more have all made significant contributions to improving the health of people all around the world. In the healthcare industry, the dependence on medical technology cannot be overstated. It is the result of these development and brilliant innovations that the healthcare practitioners can continue to find ways to improve their practice – from better diagnosis, surgical procedures, and improved patient care. Some of the latest examples are:

  • EMR (Electronic Medical Record) & HER (Electronic Health Records) on mobile devices on the job, physicians can now have access to any type of information they need – from drug information, research and studies, patient history or records, and more – within mere seconds.
  • Medical technologies like minimally-invasive surgeries, better monitoring systems, and more comfortable scanning equipment are allowing patients to spend less time in recovery and more time enjoying a healthy life.
  • The integration of medical equipment technology and telehealth has also created robotic surgeries, where in some cases, physicians do not even need to be in the operating room with a patient when the surgery is performed.
  • Medical scientists and physicians are constantly conducting research and testing new procedures to help prevent, diagnose, and cure diseases as well as developing new drugs and medicines that can lessen symptoms or treat ailments.

There are several technology start-ups coming up in the healthcare space. How does Innov4Sight Health and Biomedical Systems intend to become a differentiator?

The ecosystem – Instead of having one solution for the problem and depending on others for the results Innov4sight is targeting to solve the problems from multiple direction. Example for infertility we are coming up with a medical simulator that will be complimented by Training courses for the doctors to get more proficient in the infertility techniques. Also, we are working on regenerative medicine based growth factor therapy for female and male infertility. Also a data analytics based telemedicine platform for patients.

The Team – To attack a problem from multiple fronts we require a diverse team. We have professionals with 240+ man-years of experience in healthcare, IT, analytics, marketing, and technology and backed by industry veterans and research institutions like IIT-M, Team Innov4Sight has 75+ member dedicated team that powers the vision.

Digital therapeutics is a nascent, if growing trend in India. How are you going to be a pathfinder in this space?

At the service provider side, the main focus in India in healthcare IT is on digitisation. Which means automation of the entire process, paperless transitions, prescription and diagnostics and then there is scanning to older documents to adhere to government norms. On the patient side, focus is aggregation of services and telemedicine. These can take us to a certain point. We need to go beyond these and start thinking of an automated system which can take care of all the healthcare issues without dropping even a single case. We need to completely democratise and demonetise healthcare. Innov4sight is trying to achieve the same.

Elaborate on your offerings and its advantages. How can it change cancer care in the country?

ParSight – Parsight is a data analytics platform. We are currently developing this for oncology. Parsight links to disparate information on cancer patients who significantly affect cancer research in many areas, including quality improvement, outcomes, comparative effectiveness research, practice standards, research methods, and epidemiology. The linkages made between secondary, observational datasets enable research on key and increasingly important populations not represented in clinical trials data standalone. ParSight’s model is aggregated from various silos, linked and transformed into a standard dataset model that supports a multi-disciplinary team review of the patient population and the cancer pathway that will unlock insights which facilitates better informed decisions improving patient outcomes. Parsight combines discrete data from patient chart, including unstructured clinical notes, pathology reports, prescription notes etc. to assemble a complete view of each patient’s diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes. Parsight has built web-based search tools to support rapid query and exploration of these data.

eHAT – eHAT Oncology package is built with attention to details and inputs from practicing oncologists. Implementable on cloud, in premise or on a hybrid platform makes it easy to access from anywhere and any device.

  • Oncology EHR
  • TNM & Group Staging
  • Practice Management
  • e – RX, CPOE & Order Management
  • H&P templates
  • Care plans
  • Chemotherapy regimes
  • ICD 10 & ICD 10 O’
  • Alerts & Allergies
  • Patient dashboards
  • Automatic drug dosage calculation
  • Advanced reporting
  • Nursing documentations

Tell us about your tie-ups with healthcare providers in the country.

  • We are working with Tata Memorial Centre on ParSight and few other major oncology centres.
  • For Fertility Simulator our SME is Singapore general hospital. For the Growth Factor Therapy for infertility, we have MoUs with many IVF centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Coimbatore.
  • Apart from these, we have also partnered with academia for multifaceted research projects.

You have implemented a pilot project at Tata Memorial Hospital. Elaborate on the experience and its learnings.

The first versions of the Parsight was deployed in one of the departments of TMC in Jan 2016 with 17000 reports, which was used by the doctors and interns in the TMC. The next version was deployed with the suggested changes and with the 117000 reports. This experience gave us a good base to test our product and further improve. TMC, being one of the largest cancer hospital in world, working there gave us the minute details of working of the system. This helped us to come up with the functional follow of ParSight along with the base reports to test the system.

Plus, working at any hospital brings the entire company very close to reality emotionally. We could see the difference our product is making and can make in future. This is not only enriching and fulfilling but also gave us a sense of responsibility to bring in the necessary changes in system to make it better. As senior management we saw the  change in the junior staff post the completion of project, they were more enthusiastic and energetic to take on cancer head-on.

What are your growth plans and strategies for the next three years? How would you raise funds for expansion, especially in a scenario where businesses are finding it difficult to find investors?

In the next three years the goals are:

Company – To have a global present.
Parsight – To become largest data source on cancer cases with over two million records.
Therostics – To have our off-the-shelf growth factor concentrate for infertility therapies. To come up with a regenerative medicine therapy for cancer.
Simulators – To complete the ecosystem and have around major seven simulators – fertility, laparoscopy, brain surgery etc.
HITA (Health IT Academy) – To have a total of five million healthcare professionals on the HITA Platform.

We have a funding of $ 1 million right now. We are targeting for Series-A around – June 2017.

In our experience, we have not found that raising money is difficult. With proper products, sales and profit plan companies don’t have any difficulty is raising money. The problem we see right now is to properly time all the steps and raise an adequate amount as required.

lakshmipriya.nair@expressindia.com