Interview | India’s healthcare digitalisation needs bigger push for better impact

A mechanical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Mudit Dandwate cofounded Dozee, India’s first contactless solution that is pioneering remote patient-monitoring in hospitals and homes, with partner Gaurav Parchani in 2015.

Dozee’s solution allows for continuously tracking heart health, respiration, sleep quality and stress levels with medical-grade accuracy and it can also conduct risk analysis. The startup has filed several patents on detecting and predicting respiratory, cardiac and neurological patterns and providing in-depth analysis of vital signals for early warning of health deterioration. In this chat with Moneycontrol, Dandwate said the solution can save lives and resources. Edited excerpts:

Dozee, through its sensing technology, monitors the vibrations produced in every heartbeat, every respiration cycle, and so on. And then using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, it converts these into different biomarkers to monitor a person's heart, respiration, blood pressure, sleep, and different other clinical parameters without even touching the person's body. Thus, it upgrades any bed into a kind of a step-down intensive care unit and then AI algorithms are also used to monitor the trend of the user continuously. If there is any kind of anomaly or high-risk situation, it immediately alerts the caretaker and the clinicians so that they can take corrective actions and that is how it saves lives.

There are multiple benefits – No. 1 being that it can be used in any kind of setting, be it ICU or high-dependency unit hospital bed or even at home. The second is that it is very convenient for the patient. So all that they have to do is just lie down and there are no wires or electrodes attached there. The third thing is that it saves a lot of manual work on the part of the nurses and clinicians who get all the data without manual intervention. And because the data is also available remotely, they need not be at the patient's bedside.

We are associated with nearly 300 hospitals across India, both in the public as well as private sectors. We work with several medical college hospitals as well as corporate hospital chains, regional hospital brands and even single standalone multi-specialty hospitals.

We are working with about 50 public hospitals all across India and our experience has been very good in terms of the impact that we are able to deliver as the public health care sector is still more deprived and it caters to a larger population. Sattva Consultancy, which is one of the impact assessment agencies, carried out an analysis and the results were staggering because we could prove that for every 100 devices that we are putting out in public hospitals, we are saving almost Rs 2.7 crore annually, by reducing the average length of stay inside ICUs and so on.

Also, we are saving about 144 lives on an annual basis and also saving another very important resource – time – and the assessment showed that 80 percent of the nursing hours were being saved with our solution. These findings have helped us in refining our pitch and how we approach public healthcare settings. And it is also motivating for us that what we are doing is aiding India’s health infrastructure in a significant way.

It’s not always easy but in the post-COVID-19 scenario, the focus has been on giving quality care across and on digitisation in healthcare. While it’s not easy, it’s not impossible either. And after you have worked with hospital settings for a while you understand how the system works and then you start navigating the pathways as well.

Now, our plan is to reach the 1,000-hospital mark and upgrade close to about 30,000 hospital beds in India, both in public as well as in private. In the process, we will save thousands of lives, lakhs of nursing hours and crores of health infrastructure money, which is required to pull something like this off.

I would like to see more changes in terms of digitisation policies. Because right now we are still doing a lot of work manually and for that we require lots of manpower, which we are lacking all across the country. So telemedicine, digital health, I think these are the big pushes which are required. I am not saying it is not happening – for instance, there is a National Digital Health Mission now – but this sector needs an even bigger push to make an impact at a larger level.