The product roadmap explains why, what, and how a tech startup is building something. This week, Bloggi looks at the product journeys of three health tech startups: Practo, Niramai, and MFine, to see how they approached their products from the ground up and how they’ve grown since.
These firms have progressed from fixing a single problem to incorporating numerous parts to address a variety of healthcare challenges. Here’s a quick rundown.
From A Doctor-Focused Saas Platform To A Full-Fledged Healthcare Ecosystem
When Shashank ND and Abhinav Lal, two NIT Suratkal engineering students, founded the health tech platform Practo in 2007, they had three basic ideas in mind: access to quality treatment, better and enhanced care at an affordable price, and safety and privacy of all information and interaction.
The pair chose to begin by making doctors and high-quality healthcare more accessible by making it simple for healthcare providers and patients to connect. Practo has over 180 million users, and five million patient stories, and offers 10 million hours of doctor consultation per month after 12 years of operation. Over 76,000 clinics and hospitals are affiliated with the site.
By establishing a software solution for doctors to easily manage their appointments and scheduling, the objective was to harness emerging technologies to revolutionize clinical functioning across India and improve the patient experience.
The team went forward in 2012 to ensure that patients had access to healthcare 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which led to the creation of the Practo App.
Breast Cancer Detection Made Easier
When Geetha Manjunath learned that her close cousin had breast cancer, she was working in AI R&D for a multinational corporation Xerox. Her husband’s relative received the same illness a few months later. Geetha was taken aback by the fact that both women were under 45 years old. In 2016, she co-founded Niramai alongside Nidhi Mathur, a health tech business that employs artificial intelligence to diagnose cancer in its early stages.
The Thermalytix, the company’s patented product, is a portable, non-invasive, radiation-free, and non-contact solution for early-stage breast cancer detection. It functions by taking the temperature of the chest and producing a report.
The deep-tech Bengaluru-based healthcare business just got FDA approval in the United States for its first gadget, the SMILE-100 System. The breast thermography gadget aids healthcare professionals in examining, measuring, and analyzing thermally relevant indications in the breast area. It can be employed in a hospital, acute care settings, outpatient surgery, healthcare practitioner facilities, or any other setting where certified healthcare staff gives patient care.
According to Geetha, there are just a few ways to diagnose breast cancer. Mammography is the most prevalent, and it uses density differences to try to locate cancerous tumors in the breast. According to Geetha, the tumors are detected as white on X-rays.
She claims that mammography should be done no more than once every two years to avoid radiation concerns. Breasts are also denser in women under the age of 40. This implies that the entire breast appears white on mammography, preventing almost half of women from having a routine breast cancer screening. Furthermore, mammography can be excruciatingly unpleasant and inconvenient.
The technology creates thorough quantitative reports with clinical information and calculates cancer risk, allowing doctors to make quick and precise judgments.
Using AI To Make Virtual Consultations More Convenient
Former Myntra co-founders Prasad Kompalli and Ashutosh Lawania weren’t the first to launch the online telemedicine business MFine in February 2017. However, they had discovered a significant market gap. MFine is an AI-powered on-demand healthcare service that connects consumers to virtual consultations and connected care programs across India’s hospitals.
Users can consult doctors from prominent healthcare institutions via video or chat on the platform. MFine, unlike its competitors, collaborates with prominent hospitals rather than aggregating individual doctors on its site.
From the information that the patient provides, MFine gives doctors the best collection of diagnoses, information, and treatment plans, from which they can choose the best course of action and treatment plan. All of this is accomplished through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The team behind MFine intended to find a solution to automate the doctor’s 85% time spent collecting information from their patients. Every senior doctor in the system has a virtual avatar that may converse with patients and summarise the prognosis.
