Founded in 2017 by Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli, mfine is a healthcare startup based in Bengaluru which offers professional diagnostics and check-up services by connecting consumers with doctors and medical professionals. By making the best use of cutting-edge technology, mfine aims at providing a seamless customer experience in the healthcare sector by pooling top hospitals as well as the finest doctors in the field.
mfine recently bagged a Series-A funding of $4.2 million led by Prime Venture Partners along with participation from its existing investors, Stellaris Venture Partners and entrepreneur Mayur Abhaya. In a conversation with Prasad Kompalli, CEO at mfine, we discuss how mfine has carved a niche in the healthcare industry.
The Journey
The passion to provide an easy-to-access quality healthcare platform led the founders Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli bring mfine to fruition. They believed that newer technologies such as artificial intelligence and mobile internet would revolutionise healthcare in India. With a strong emphasis on customer experience, mfine focusses on tackling the complexities and improve the perception of healthcare in India by integrating AI related technologies.
Prasad reminisces the healthcare scenario of India in the initial days of mfine, “We understood the complexities with the overall space being vast with many different players, different economic models, incentive structures and varied consumer behaviours. We zeroed in on high-quality and on-demand access to be at the foundation of what we would build.
To bring in the much-needed trust and quality, we partnered with hospitals as providers and these hospitals are trusted and premium institutions such as CloudNine, Femiint Health and Aster CMI Hospitals. With technology we are able to take the high-quality care beyond the walls of the hospitals.” he says.
Currently, mfine has a team of 50 employees taking care of both technology and marketing aspects of the company. Prasad is confident that the number would be doubled by the end of 2018.
AI Meets Healthcare
By aligning standard medical protocols to AI systems, mfine analyses various data sources such as global standards for symptoms, disease ontologies and literature and research data required for those systems. In addition, it captures customer interaction data for easier visualisation of the underlying health-related problems. This way, it assists doctors and medical professionals in a smoother diagnosis.
mfine also has a unique standard reference system catering to different medical specialisations. This system is powered by mfine’s learning algorithms which have medical protocols integrated into it. Parallely, this reference system works on the consumer app for tasks such as reminders for follow-up appointments to customers and even on data collection.
The Advent Cloud Clinics
In order for all the healthcare resources to be under one roof, mfine has created a ‘cloud clinic’ for offering exceptional, hassle-free services anywhere across the globe. Cloud clinic has some of the unique characteristics, which are given below:
- High-quality care beyond physical boundaries
- Connected care ensuring the effective management of chronic conditions and situations where consumers need long-term care – eg. pregnancy and childcare.
- On-demand access helping with prevention of complications, ER visits etc.
With these characteristics, mfine aims to tackle the low doctor-patient ratio omnipresent in the country through an AI-powered technology ecosystem. On account of this, Prasad highlights how ‘cloud clinic’ and its solutions have made an impact in the health space. “Six months into launch, we have done more than 25,000 consultations and aim to reach 100,000 consultations by the end of the year. We have partnered with 30 hospital brands in Bangalore and are expanding our network continuously,” he said.
Challenges
Prasad emphasises that the major challenge in any AI endeavour is having access to good data. He recalls that mfine had a similar issue and how it made use of the publicly available medical data to build the learning system. In addition, mfine also made use of data available in journals and publications.
When it comes to having a competitive advantage, Prasad is of the opinion that high-quality services to customers precede anything else. “We are focused on bringing trusted, reputable and high-quality hospitals into digital space and are not a marketplace of individual doctors. Secondly, Our AI-powered tech system can scale quality care and make it reach millions of people. These two aspects make us very unique in the way we build mfine as a tech-led and consumer experience focussed business.” he believes.
The Path Ahead
Mfine plans to expand its foothold in the country by having a complete network in five major cities by the end of 2018. It aims to be a ‘comprehensive’ healthcare platform for families and individuals. In addition, it will be introducing long-term care programs in 2018 to assist consumers with chronic conditions.
With this, mfine will definitely change the way healthcare institutions and their services are perceived. “Hospitals look at mfine as a new centre they are opening without any upfront capital and marketing investment. They see mfine expanding their services to the cloud so that they can serve more new customers and also retain existing customers better,” says Prasad proudly.
