Founded in 2016, HealthPlix Technologies is a Bengaluru-based healthtech startup. Co-founded by Sandeep Gudibanda, Prasad Basavaraj and Raghuraj Sunder Raju, HealthPlix provides digital tools to doctors to practice online and improve patient outcomes. Its assistive artificial intelligence-powered EMR solution helps doctors prepare prescriptions in 30 seconds and in 20 different languages.The software is also capable of writing in 20 regional languages. According to the company, over 60 percent of prescriptions are printed in regional languages.
In a conversation with Analytics India Magazine, Sandeep, Co-founder and CEO at HealthPlix, explains the technology behind its assistive artificial intelligence-powered EMR software:
AIM: What was your flagship product? What products/services do you offer now?
Sandeep Gudibanda: The assistive-AI powered EMR Software has been our flagship product ever since 2016. Now, we also offer a mobile application– HealthPlix SPOT, for doctors. Using the SPOT app, doctors can build virtual clinics for online consultations.
Our offering Robin serves as a digital outreach tool for various healthcare stakeholders, including pharma firms. HealthPlix real-world evidence platform Darwin provides data driven insights (at an aggregate level) for improving healthcare outcomes.
AIM: When was the assistive-AI powered EMR software developed? Who is the brainchild behind the product?
Sandeep Gudibanda: Our HealthPlix EMR software has largely defined who we are as a company. HealthPlix initially started to help doctors connect with patients digitally. But that model wasn’t working. We saw that doctors’ biggest problem was the ability to remember a patient’s history and medical records. That’s when the idea of EMR came into play.
EMR has been popular since the early 2000’s in developed countries like the US. However, India has not seen a widespread adoption of the technology yet. With HealthPlix, we plan to change that by designing an EMR focusing on the needs of Indian doctors. The Printed Rx and the ability to give a Rx in regional language adds another delight factor for the patients.
The EMR learns from the usage patterns of the doctors, with an effective use of personalisation machine learning models and we learn from every keystroke that the doctor makes. The collective learning models from the overall doctors on the platform helps in identifying patterns and modules that are most effective. We use ensemble machine learning models in various suggestions offered to the doctors and learn from the feedback models inbuilt into the system.
The product has seen more than two major changes since its inception. Initially we focused on bringing time-based efficiency towards how doctors operated, and it resulted in a lot of traction. Later, we introduced ROBIN– a specialty-based, disease-based, stage of the disease based clinical assistance to doctors to provide improved clinical productivity. Second major change was the introduction of video consults during COVID-19. This feature on doctors EMR helped us onboard a lot more doctors onto digital platforms.
AIM: Explain the working and use case of the EMR software?
Sandeep Gudibanda: Healthplix EMR helps provide digital track records for patients to doctors. It can be accessed anywhere and from any device, helping to retain patient data and create prescriptions. This is created through machine learning algorithms that can assist doctors to write prescriptions faster.
Primary Use Cases for doctors are:
- Digital health record for patients
- Printed Rx in less than 30 seconds
- Regional language support
- Speciality modules for consulting physicians and endocrinologists. We serve more than 16 specialties across chronic and acute space.
- In-clinic and tele-consultation modules
- Better health outcomes using assistive AI/ML technologies for chronic patient management
- Patient data security
In a test survey done on 30 doctors on before-and-after EMR adoption, we saw 7x increase in diagnosis capture, 4x increase in complaints capture, 1.8x increase in test results capture and 5x increase in advice written, when compared to their previous non-EMR practice records.
AIM: Tell us about the tech stack.
Sandeep Gudibanda: We have always invested heavily in creating a secure and fully encrypted tech stack that prioritises patient and doctor data security. Our cloud infrastructure is built on AWS and GCloud. The rest of the Tech Stack is as follows:
- For backend: Core PhP, Python, MySQL, Redis
- For frontend: Vanilla JS, JQuery, React JS
- For mobile app: Android Native, React Native
AIM: How many doctors are using your product today?
Sandeep Gudibanda: At present, 12 million patients have been treated through HealthPlix EMR platform by doctors practicing across 16 specialties in the country. Our doctor base and geographic spread is across 370-plus cities. On a daily basis, we see around 6000 doctors use the platform. The usage goes up to three-hours per day on average.
AIM: What are your forward looking plans?
Sandeep Gudibanda: We believe that doctors are the most influential decision-makers in healthcare. We will continue to invest heavily in tools and technologies that will make doctors practice more efficient, scalable, and reliable.
We are also working on a speciality module for the Pediatricians– a product designed to assist specifically in the 0-5 years old patients care. Pedia module enables immunisation tracking, growth charts for toddlers and infants, development charts and pediatric care plans for customised care.
We are currently the largest EMR player in India with widest coverage across specialities and geographies. However, we aspire to grow 8x in two-years based on our strong fundamentals, expanding the team and adding more product depth. India will continue to be a priority market for us in 2021 and 2022. Going forward, we plan to build a digital healthcare stack that will power the end-to-end clinic and patient management for the doctors.
