Personal trauma gave birth to this healthtech startup

Founded in 2009, Innov4sightHealth and Biomedical Systems was conceptualised by a group of buccaneer scholars - Geetha Sanjay, Co-founder CEO, Knowledge Management, Balachandra Agoramurthy, Co-founder & VP, Research and Development, along with Vijaygopal R, Founder & CEO of the healthtech startup. As a socially conscious business enterprise, the venture was launched officially in 2014. Since then, Innov4Sight has successfully piloted its flagship solution for the health industry.

The healthtech venture has received seed investment of $1million in 2015 from a group of angel investors. Its Business Development activity is in full swing with many opportunities being pursued to market products and solutions and consists of a fully equipped State-of-the-art facility. With a team of over 30 people, the entire infrastructure is built in a rented facility in Bengaluru with technical, domain as well as delivery capabilities

The startup closely work with Asia’s largest teaching hospital Singapore General Hospital and World’s largest Cancer Research Centre - Tata Memorial Centre (TMC), Mumbai and has completed the pilot implementation at one of the departments at TMC.

The company primarily stands over four pillars - Biotech, IT, EdTech and Biomedical Engineering.

Key products

It offers two main products namely – Parsight, which is an integrated big data analysis engine with search capability and XPerienceRX, a healthcare simulation, to provide better outcome for patients.

In an exclusive conversation with WI Bureau, Vijayagopal R shared the business DNA of the venture.

How the idea was born?

The personal trauma and experience is what brought us together to conceptualise this venture. Every one of the three members, either have a family member suffering from cancer or has somebody close who has suffered trauma personally, due to healthcare challenges, be it medicine or treatment. The venture has been put together because people have experienced errors in prescriptions, diagnostics and surgery personally in their lives.

Business DNA: The B2B firm is in the business of assisting clinicians and other health professionals by providing solutions that help in dipping the rate of errors in diagnostics, prescriptions and surgery.

The initial investment was made by the founders of the venture, while later the company bagged over $1million from a group of angel investors.

Further, elaborating on the next round of funding, Vijaygopal said, “We are looking at raising about a million dollars from HNIs and strategic investors from the industry (Health and allied industry). The funds will be utilised for acquisition and go to markets for various offering that are being done in the same ecosystem.”

Presently, the Co-founders hold 60 per cent share in the company, the leadership community has about 20 per cent company while the investors hold about 20 per cent share in the company.

Growing rage of eHealth in India

In the areas like biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, information technology, the development of medical devices and equipment, Medical Nanobots, Genetics and more have all made significant contributions to improve the health of people all across the globe.

In the healthcare industry, the dependence on medical technology cannot be overstated, and as a result of the development of these brilliant innovations, 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 and HER on mobile devices on the job, physicians can now have access to any type of information they need – from drug information, research and studies to patient history or records, and more – within a few 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 tele-health 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.

Challenge of eHealth 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, the focus is on 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. Innov4sigth is trying to achieve the same.

Geographical presence

Currently we are operating in India and Singapore. We look to expand in the rest of ASEAN and SAARC by end to current fiscal and next fiscal, we are also planning to expand in North America.

Scaling your venture

While, we've built the MVP and the platform over the past 2 years, we recently discovered a pivot on the go-to-market and seeking funding to accelerate our revenue engine.

Future plans

• a.Parsight: to become largest data source on cancer cases with over 2 million Records.
• b.Therostics: to have our off-the-shelf growth factor concentrate for Infertility therapies. To come up with a regenerative medicine therapy for Cancer.
• c.Simulators: To complete the ecosystem and have around seven major simulators – Fertility, Laparoscopy, Brain Surgery etc.
• d.HITA (Health IT Academy) to have a total of 5million healthcare professionals on the HITA Platform.

Ecommerce in healthcare

Data with more complexities keep evolving in healthcare, thus, leading to more opportunities for big data analytics. One of the major challenges is interoperability, necessary for exchange of data between institutions, among clinicians, with patients, payers, registries, and public reporting entities. Data standards need to be refined and adopted widely. Data need to be collected at the point of care or directly from the patient in a manner that can be easily standardised and extracted.

Electronic health record developers need to work cooperatively to ensure that their systems communicate seamlessly with each other and with the appropriate networks.

The IT industry can assist in the development of data standards, collection systems, and standardised data repositories that facilitate reporting and analysis. It is imperative that vendors of electronic health records actively participate in this process since easily collected and extracted data is essential for providing high-quality healthcare delivery system.