It’s barely a year old start-up and has already evinced a lot interest from heavyweights. But what sets apart THB from a bunch of other companies is that it is causing major disruptions in the health-tech sector. A clinical research and data analytics company, THB is mining data, unravelling new data streams to provide new knowledge and coming up with life-changing algorithms which can have a potential to help patients and positively impact the healthcare industry.
The start-up received a flurry of press in the past few weeks, thanks to the undisclosed amount of funding it raised from its supporting base of investors and advisors. In an interaction with Analytics India Magazine, THB co-founder and CEO Akansh Khurana stays tight-lipped about the fund infusion, but he affirms THB received a phenomenal 30% subscription over what they had planned to raise. “We have a very supporting investors and advisors — some of them CXOs of healthcare players in India and international markets (ME, SE Asia etc.). At this point, we have the capital, the right team, and an incredible set of mentors to setup the strong foundation. And we are preparing ourselves to run a marathon,” he noted.
The healthcare industry has seen a fundamental change in the recent years, from digitizing patient medical records to aggregating hospital information. And THB has moved several notches up by setting new clinical data standards. Their two key platforms THB Externalytics and THB Clinytics offer data structuring (incl. structured and unstructured sets) and analytics modules that run on top of the structured datasets thereby deriving better insights. The start-up is already servicing 15 clients ranging from clinicians, providers, insurance, and pharma.
Analytics has taken on starring role given the reams of data being generated from patient and hospital records. But the real value of data lies in the positive outcomes and better insights it helps to derive. That’s where THB sets itself apart. “THB is focused on identifying data and analytical use-cases where they can track RoI for our customers — either monetarily, or as patient care and outcomes, and automating those use-cases, so our product platform can deliver seamless insights on a click of a button, with no manual interventions,” shares Khurana.
What the Gurgaon-based start-up is doing essentially is automating clinical analytics, by building client-agnostic analytical platform, with a simple plug-n-play data structuring engine, and a range of analytical modules to deliver insights. “We believe that delivering analytical insights has to be a consistent, and seamless process. It cannot and should not depend on individuals and manual interventions. Our starting point is India, given the market access and our relationships, but the platform we are building is globally relevant and scalable,” says Khurana.
Snapshot of the Healthcare Analytics Industry
Over the years, the healthcare industry has undergone massive changes, leading to new opportunities. The Indian healthcare analytics market is billed at $1 billion. Increasing penetration of healthcare technology system directly leads to new data streams, and therefore spawns new opportunities for analytics. “We estimate that most of this is outsourced analytics from US and developed markets to India. Our internal assessment says that healthcare analytics market serving India providers and ecosystem is to the tune of $150-200mn. Most of this today is captured by consulting / advisory companies, and not necessarily pure-play analytics providers,” says Khurana.
THB’s product offering
THB’s platform has two key components:
(a) data structuring, incl. structured and unstructured sets
(b) analytical modules that run on top of the structured datasets
The modules offer: (1) business intelligence insights, (2) clinical analytics and decision support, as well as (3) personalized patient care and engagement. The module drives value for all key stakeholders of the data — patient, doctor, and the management teams.
While Externalytics is largely analytical application, Clinytics also offers an in-built Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solution. THB identified EMR as a key gap in the market with most healthcare providers lacking an EMR system that would have helped them in capturing valuable data for real-time and long-term value creation.
THB – an inside view
Let’s find out who’s holding the fort at THB. Founded by four members, Rajesh Pachar, Gagandeep Singh, Rohit Kumar and Khurana, each one is heading an important division. While Pachar leads product development, Khurana tends to the market, Singh drives product management and client implementation and Rohit drives the analytics end, heading data structuring and analytical engines. THB is also staffed with a core team of medical directors with stalwarts from All India Institute of Medical Sciences and PGI Chandigarh heading the division.
From analysis to insights — tech enabled solutions to solve life-changing problems
THB’s big breakthrough would be the life-changing algorithms across select life threatening specialties the start-up is working on. “We have been working with a leading liver transplant surgeon to develop an algorithm that predicts factors that could affect liver transplant outcomes in Indian settings. We are getting to a stage where for a given donor and recipient profile, we can predict that how should the liver graft be cut to achieve best possible outcomes,” shared Khurana.
If it becomes a success, it would truly revolutionize medicine, surgical practices and lower the costs of care in ways that have never been seen before. “We are working across many similar life-changing algorithms and models. We have an in-house team of medical directors that apply all the medical science and keep us true to the clinical needs and protocols,” said Khurana.
Analytics – big breakthrough in healthcare or need of the hour?
The healthcare sector has transitioned from simply being aggregators or service providers to a clinical model trying to assess the deluge of data, uncovering value from volumes of data. This in turn, has spawned a new class of analytics vendors who use the wealth of data to drive value-based care. We believe it’s a pressing need rather than a breakthrough. And to ensure financial viability, the clinical models need to align themselves with healthcare providers and engage physicians in driving value-based care.
Khurana shares a key emerging trend in health tech sector. “There are several analytics companies that are trying to become extended analytical arms of healthcare players, be it insurance, or large healthcare providers. Cross-functional or cross-departmental analytics is also emerging rapidly, where companies are looking to learn from multiple systems at their premises, including but not limited to HMS, LIS, EMR, ERP, Billing, CRM etc. This is where data integration smart and structuring becomes a necessity, before offering analytical applications / modules,” he says.
