Making Healthcare easy through technology | LiveHealth Featured in Sakal Times | Tuesday, 22 March 2017
Making healthcare easy through technology, LiveHealth helps you book an appointment at the diagnostics centre and track your reports online.
Two enterprising youngsters, Abhimanyu Bhosale and Mukund Malani, decided to explore the field of healthcare after realising the existence of an extreme technology gap. The duo started out three years ago with their startup LiveHealth after studying engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology. At first, their initiative may seem complicated but if you understand the motive behind the project, you will understand its operations in minutes.
Bhosale feels that the idea of working on a startup was a better decision any day than appearing for campus placement interviews and joining the corporate rat race.
Through LiveHealth, they have made an attempt to change the way healthcare test reports are delivered. It is a platform that delivers medical records to patients on their mobiles, and connects them to healthcare providers thus creating an approachable ecosystem for better understanding of their medical records.
Bhosale shares, “I was interning at a health tech company and realised that there is a wide tech gap and that healthcare services should be inter-operable in hospitals where if a person chooses to go from one hospital to another for the tests, the latter should have the reports, thus making the task easy for them.”
LiveHealth also enables healthcare payments in real time. The company delivers a seamless mobile experience in healthcare and enables healthcare providers to have simpler, secure and quick accessibility to medical records and centres. Reducing the delivery cost and improving the efficiency are few of the crucial differentiators for LiveHealth.
Bhosale shares, “We provide data for doctors, hospitals, laboratories and patients. But it took us a lot of time to figure out the loopholes. The labs and healthcare centres have their own way of functioning but since it is one field, all of their operations should be the same thus making things easy for people.”
The duo has successfully established a network of 450 labs from 43 cities across the country with a wide presence in three APAC (Asian Pacific region) countries that are using the LiveHealth’s platform. About 600,000 patients and 10,000 active users are already registered on LiveHealth. The company has also received their first round of angel funding.
Bhosale says in order to achieve something, never have a back-up plan. He adds, “If I had a job as my back-up plan, I would have never taken this project seriously. I consistently focused on this venture which is why we have reached to this height in three years.”
LiveHealth is also available as an app on Android and iOS, where people can choose the centre they want to get their medical tests done and book an appointment in advance.
In the age of technology, you don’t have to get a hard copy since you will constantly get updates about your medical reports and you can see the entire details on your app.
LiveHealth – Digitising Medical Records & Tracking Health
You realise how revolutionary LiveHealth is only after you have fully understood how it functions. Keeping all the medical and technical jargon aside, the founders of this healthcare startup, Abhimanyu Bhosale and Mukund Malani, explain it in simple terms. They are engineering graduates, who studied from the ‘Pune Institute of Computer Technology’ and are glad that they didn’t follow the herd to work in a big organisation.
“Don’t do it!” remarks Bhosale when asked what his parents said before starting this venture. Launched in February 2014, these two techies had earlier interned with healthcare startups. Realising the potential of healthcare and integrating it with technology, LiveHealth was born. It is available as an app on Android and iOS as well as a website.
This platform allows the user to pick a diagnostic centre where he or she wants to conduct a certain test, set up an appointment and have the option of paying for it online as well. The user later goes to the centre, registers and after the billing a unique barcode is generated. This barcode is stuck on the test sample and the machine is told what tests to conduct on the sample once it scans the barcode. On the app, you can see the progress of your report in real time. You need not go all the way to the centre to pick it up. It’s on your phone and if you want a hard copy, you can print it at home too.
“We’ve provided for an end to end management of data for doctors, hospitals, patients and laboratories. This helps to transfer medical data between the stakeholders through cloud computing very easily. Diagnostics centres work with technology as information is flowing to and fro,” explains Bhosale.
The app allows you to compile data from previous medical records to show you the trends in your health. Apart from this, you can also integrate details about your body weight, mass index, vitals, lipids along with your fitness regimes to track your health better. “We received our first round of funding in November 2015 and now we are functioning with 500 medical centres across India. This app eliminates all the unnecessary paperwork involved but of course it isn’t mandatory for someone visiting one of our centres to download the app to get their medical records.” The medical centres register themselves with LiveHealth for a subscription fee on a monthly basis. The subscription also ensures quality control of the machines conducting the tests.
But setting up the technological aspect wasn’t the hardest part for these two techies. They had their troubles while approaching labs with this idea, “Neither of us have a medical background and we’re very young, so obviously no one took us seriously. When the product was developed, we showed it to a few medical professionals who liked it and came on board as advisors.” Bhosale also mentions that another challenge was integrating their system with the processes that different labs follow, “It took us two years to figure this out. All the labs and centres follow different processes. They don’t go about things the same way.” Today, LiveHealth has seven lakh patients across the country and is even associated with AIIMS, Bhubaneshwar and various NGOs.
They have roughly 25 million records and are even teaming up with other health apps like Apple Health and Fitbit.
Always thinking ahead of times, Bhosale and Malani plan to update the services in the app by providing insights on the data as compared to just showing the trends in records now. With the narrowing number of initiatives in public health solutions, LiveHealth is a necessary welcome into the market.
