At the newly opened Jan Swastha Kendra in Mohaba, an elderly man walked in, asking how long the clinic would remain open, before hurrying back home to bring his daughter-in-law. Hours later, he returned with her, worried about her persistent cough.
The teleconsultant doctor advised a chest X-ray, and within seconds of the scan, healthtech start-up Easiofy’s AI-powered platform processed the image and confirmed that her lungs were clear — it was only an allergy.
Medicines were prescribed, the old man was relieved to know it wasn’t something serious. He had no idea that behind the seamless care stood an algorithm assisting the doctor.
This is just one case study cited by the Easiofy team, of how their AI-powered platform takes imaging expertise deep into India’s hinterland, bridging the gap between the lack of radiologists and the growing need for imaging diagnosis.
Impressed by the impact of their work, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the three co-founders the “Teen Deviyan”— because as goddesses, their AI platform has granted good health to patients and strengthened rural health systems.
Today, Easiofy’s “Teen Deviyan” – Meenal Gupta, founder and CEO, Noor Fatma, co-founder & CTO, and Sheetal Tarkas, co-founder and COO, are an example of how deep-tech is solving real world on-the-ground challenges in India’s healthcare ecosystem.
Tarkas narrates how Easiofy was born out of a painful personal experience, when Fatma’s father was diagnosed with cancer during COVID. As sharing data was not feasible, diagnosis and treatment were delayed. The founders, who knew each other for more than two decades, (Gupta and Fatma were colleagues in HCLTech, while Gupta was Tarkas’ senior in college) decided to find a solution, combining their skills in AI-ML (Gupta and Fatma) and data analysis (Tarkas) to build a platform where they could share data, and use AI to diagnose diseases.
The solution today helps radiation oncologists to automate the auto segmentation process, which is traditionally done manually. As Tarkas explains, “It takes almost one and a half hour to hour to manually contour the scans. We have reduced the time so it’s done automatically, under five minutes.”
Highlighting the need gap, Fatma says, “There are around 15,000 radiologists available in the country, and there are around one lakh scans being done. This is the volume mismatch There are entire districts in India where there is not a single radiologist available to report.”
Walking us through the process Fatma explains that once a person gets an X ray, it goes into the Easiofy system, and an AI generated report is available within seconds. The AI report will mention what the problem could be, where it could be, and highlight the region as well, so that it becomes easy for a GP to provide medicines.
As a start up, the founders have made it a point to maintain a frugal mindset. Talking about their funding strategy to stay financially sustainable, Fatma says, “Our solution is a software platform, hence the operational cost is low. The main cost is salaries of people, and cloud charges. That is one way the margins are higher and why we are able to stay afloat.”
Easiofy’s major source of funding is government grants, and secondly, getting organisations to sponsor their screening camps as part of their CSR activities. Easiofy’s AI based X ray software platform currently screens for various pulmonary diseases like TB, COPD, etc.
An enabling bridge
Tarkas credits the team at the MeitY-NASSCOM Centre of Excellence (CoE) for helping Easiofy focus on a niche. She narrates how the three founders were associated with NASSCOM way before they registered their company in September 2022. The CoE team mentored the start up, connecting them to networks, guided them through various pivots and then helped them choose and focus on the present niche in radiology.
Sudhanshu Mittal, Head & Director, Technical Solutions, MeitY-NASSCOM CoE talks about how the organisation is bridging the gap between startups, enterprises (ranging from medtech companies to health care service providers like hospitals, clinics, diagnostic chains), academia, and government. The overarching aim is to solve real world healthcare challenges, leveraging deep tech like IoT, AI, Big Data, AR/VR, and robotics.
Delving into the process, he says, “We work with both the enterprise side and the startup community. Among startups, it’s mostly the mid-level ones who have demonstrated the capability and maturity of their product and are ready to work with enterprise partners. We ask enterprises to give us their problem statements, explaining where they are facing challenges and then invite applications from start ups to solve these challenges/problem statements. We curate these applications and ultimately find two or three players which can address the specific requirements of a particular partner.”
As an example, Mittal talks about the JanCARE project (also called the Amrit Grand Challenge), which focused on Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and government hospitals in low resource areas, like tier-2, 3 cities and rural areas. Funded by DBT/BIRAC, MeitY, and NASSCOM, in collaboration with Grand Challenges India (GCI) and several other partners, the project helped them with the deployment of digital healthtech solutions.
Mittal also mentions another programme called the Healthcare Innovation Challenge. In the six editions so far, he estimates that they have worked with 30 plus enterprise partners and enabled 25 plus proof of concepts (PoCs).
Some of the key problem-solving areas that the MeitY-NASSCOM CoE in Healthtech focuses on are enabling predictive healthcare with AI led post surgery admission models, transforming claim management through AI powered rejection prediction, early detection of chemotherapy toxicities using AI risk profiling, democratising eye care diagnostics via mobile AI driven fundus imaging, enhancing rural patient counseling with LLM based healthcare chatbots, streamlining hospital workflows with AI automated discharge summaries, empowering paramedics through AI driven clinical decision support in pre hospital care from innovation at scale via CoE IoT’s #FAME incubator model (funding, mentorship, enterprise connect).
While MeitY-NASSCOM CoE has an annual fee model for medtech enterprises who submit their problem statements, healthcare providers are not charged as of now, as many projects hit implementation challenges. While a CIO might want to implement a solution for a challenge, there are road blocks when it comes to deploying the solutions.
Mittal opines that the solution is to build awareness by showing them success stories with other players in the ecosystem and letting them see that the adoption is ultimately going to be useful.
Circling back to Easiofy, MeitY-NASSCOM CoE’s mentorship has resulted in AI powered assist tools tailored for radiology departments and hospitals, which allow real time collaborations between doctors, radiologists and care teams in remote resource scarce areas.
Their AI powered automatic segmentations help automatic contouring of organs at risk (OAR) which helps radiologists to minimise radiation to healthy organs. It has also collaborated with a neurosurgeon to develop a neuro AI system which scans for intracranial hemorrhages (ICH) and shows up even small bleeds, which might be missed initially.It is important to catch even minor bleeds as early as possible. Early interventions could prevent problems later by minor bleeds which might be missed due to lack of trained staff or in the general chaos of accident cases.
MeitY-NASSCOM CoE’s role in the success of start ups like Easiofy needs to be scaled up manyfold to solve the myriad gaps in India’s healthcare ecosystem. One hopes that more struggling start ups are inspired by such examples to approach deep tech ecosystem enablers like MeitY-NASSCOM CoE to make healthcare services more affordable and accessible in India.
VIVEKA ROYCHOWDHURY, Editor
viveka.r@expressindia.com
viveka.roy3@gmail.com