Solving one problem at a time trying to build a sustainable company while making an impact on healthcare.
How many of you have come across situations where you yourself or someone you know had ignored some symptoms while they were mild and only took actions later on? Or do you procrastinate meeting a doctor or taking health intervention because of long waiting time and all the hassle of taking leave and travelling?
If any can relate to the above, continue reading!
In today’s world when we get groceries in minutes, cabs on a click, entertainment on a click, why is healthcare so lagging behind? Why can’t we get the help we need whenever we need it – from as simple as helping with if my symptoms need attention? Telling what it could be and if needs to be treated, doing it then and there? Or as simple as diet or mental health or lifestyle related help? That’s the gap we wanted to solve for.
We started Zealth in the pursuit of improving patient outcomes with instant and personalised 24×7 care available at home. In this pursuit we talked to a lot of doctors, patients and hospital owners to design and develop CareShare.
CareShare is a combination of AI chatbot on Whatsapp and human touchpoints that uses knowledge graphs to automate complex care-pathways and assist patients with their questions on diet, exercises, medication and symptoms.
After multiple iterations of the product we were able to execute pilots in some major hospitals in India achieving a high patient engagement rate, 4x higher than current alternatives for oncology patients. We got a lot of love from the patients ❤️ primarily for the following reasons –
- No waiting time – Hospitals and long waiting times are married to each other. CareShare gives the care instantly – from symptom to diet to medication or just want to talk – everything is in real time.
- Proactive care – When was the last time you got a message from your doctor few days post consultation asking “How are you feeling now?”
- Highly personalised care – Carshare knows exactly each step of your care journey and what you can expect! It gives you a personalised recipe for your dinner when you may be feeling a bit nauseous a day after your treatment.
While we are focused on improving the life of the patients and the doctors – The biggest question is who pays for this? Who amongst all involved in the delivery of healthcare is having an immediate & tangible financial benefit from this solution?
To understand this — let’s analyse the ROI (Return on Investment) for each of the healthcare players benefiting from CareShare. Some ROI are easier to calculate while others might be much more important but harder to calculate. Irrespective – the ability to provide evidence of a clear ROI to each of the healthcare players is extremely important to achieve the success of CareShare.
- Providers ( aka Hospitals ) 🏥 — ROI of providers include cross-selling of their services, such as medicine delivery, pathology and radiology tests, followup appointment and other home-care services by giving the right message at the right time to their own patients ( Currently – they just bombard marketing messages to all patients in their database ). While these are mainly referrals & relatively easier to show, the most important ROI is improved patient retention and follow-up. It is harder and time-consuming to quantify this – however, the data collected from the continuous use of CareShare by the patients and hospitals would be pivotal in showing this ROI in the longer term.
Additionally – many larger hospitals hire care managers to handle their relationship with patients requiring long-term care. With automation – scaling to a large number of patients would be possible without linearly scaling the team.
Specially for the developed countries, where a larger section of healthcare is already implemented on a value-based care system, hospitals are financially incentivised to use products similar to CareShare that improve patient outcomes.
- Pharmaceutical companies 💊 — Patient engagement is key to Pharma companies, improving the patient support program for their drugs. In the long term – with large enough network of providers as well as patients, Pharma companies benefit from the Real World Data of the impact of their drugs on patients as evidence for post-marketing requirements and early discovery of its impact of off-label drugs. Our focus on improving patient engagement while working with providers and patients of varied geographies there is an opportunity to become a tool directly impacting the key metrics of Pharma companies.
- For patients 😷 — The empowering ability to access validated answers from their trusted doctor, immediately at their fingertips brings remarkable convenience and assurance. Most significantly, the remarkable ROI reveals itself as patients experience the long-term impact on their quality of life, resulting in improved outcomes.
The B2B2C approach to partner with the hospitals & give this service to their patients on behalf of their doctor made the most sense for CareShare.
In the past, we also tried the B2C2B approach to get a critical mass of patients before reaching out to more and more providers — however, our initial experiments showed gaining trust of patients to believe in CareShare without involvement of their treating doctor especially in post-diagnosis was not optimal compared to the B2B2C approach.
Our team at Zealth believes — while it is complex and hard to align the incentives of all healthcare players while improving the profitability of the providers — a bit of patience along with continuously capturing evidence of the efficacy of CareShare is helping us solve this maze one step at a time.
If you have reached till here — hopefully you are invested in our story in a small or big way. As we continue to navigate through the complex and ever-changing landscape of healthcare, we realize the value of connections and collaborations.
If you happen to know someone who manages a hospital, clinic, or is involved in the digital initiatives of pharmaceutical companies, your connection could be instrumental in helping us make progress more swiftly. By leveraging these relationships, we can expedite the implementation of our ideas and drive positive change in the healthcare industry.
Monika Mehta ( monika@zealth-ai.com ) & Dheeraj Mundhra ( dheeraj@zealth-ai.com )
Signing off for now – In the next blog will share more details on the experiments we tried on these & the learnings! Subscribe to our newsletter below to stay updated on the experiments.