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.
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