As the country reels under the unprecedented spike in daily Covid caseloads, start-ups are harnessing technology to help people, enterprises and hospitals fight the crisis.
During the pandemic Cloudphysician, which is part of Cisco’s Launchpad accelerator programme, has helped to manage over 2,700 critically-ill Covid patients with 30,000 interventions over more than 17,000 patient bed days in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Leh Ladakh, Bihar, Kolkata, Gujarat, among others.
“India has around 3 lakh ICU beds with under 5,000 ICU specialist doctors, therefore, over 90 per cent of ICU patients do not have access to Intensivists who are specialised in managing ICUs. The only way to solve this problem in such a crisis is by leveraging technology. We are now present in 12 States and are supporting 25 hospital centres to monitor over 250 ICU beds and assisting bedside nurses and junior doctors there to manage their ICU patients using our proprietary tech platform RADAR that connects hospital ICUs to our Command Centre manned 24X7 by a multidisciplinary ICU specialist team in Bengaluru, who intervene in real time,” said Dhruv Joshi, co-founder Cloudphysician Healthcare, who is also a pulmonary and critical care physician.
Dozee, a contactless remote patient monitoring platform featuring an AI-powered triaging system that converts any bed into a step-down ICU in a few minutes, has come to the rescue of government and private hospitals in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Karnataka to manage Covidwards.
Designed and ‘Made in India’ Dozee tracks key vitals of the patient including heart rate, respiration rate, oxygen saturation, sleep stages, stress-recovery with a medical-grade 98.4 per cent accuracy. In the last two weeks alone, over 30 hospitals have signed up with Dozee across India and currently over 4,000 Covid-19 High Dependency Unit (HDU) Beds are being monitored continuously in institutional settings.
Adopting AI technologies
“With the second wave spreading on a larger scale, hospitals are now adopting RPM & new AI technologies to help combat the coronavirus outbreak. Remote Patient Monitoring significantly reduces the risks of in-person contact, managing staff shortages, and providing people with an alternative to the traditional forms of medical consultations especially during Covid,” said Mudit Dandwate, CEO and co-founder, Dozee.
The start-up has also set up Patient Monitoring Cells within hospitals to ensure 24x7 on-ground support and alert escalation. IGMC Nagpur and ESIC, Bengaluru have these centres up and running with many other hospitals across the country looking to start operations this week.
SenseGiz Technologies, a B2B IoT solutions start-up for enterprises, tweaked its existing solutions to help enterprises with business continuity when the first Covid wave struck the country.
“We offer SenseGiz Sentinel Platform, our social distancing and contact tracing solution to over 5,000 employees pan India to help business continuity for enterprises. The solution includes hardware (wristband) and software. We have used the same solution to create a virtual Bio-Bubble for 2,500 users for the IPL that ensures the safety of all players, support staff, match officials and others involved within a dedicated zone. We deployed the solution for 1,000 plus users during the India vs England series across all formats and the Road Safety World Series too. Overall we have impacted the lives and livelihood of over 10,000 users with this solution,” said Kuldeep Rane, Head of Marketing at SenseGiz Technologies.
Video consultations
Digital health start-up Mfine is helping people monitor their own health and is enabling hospitals/doctors to continue with treatment plans through video consultations. It recently launched MFine Pulse, an app based SPO2 (blood oxygen saturation) monitoring tool which enables users to keep track of their oxygen saturation levels using just a smartphone. As the second wave of Covid cases spiral, Mfine has seen a 10X growth in SPO2 tracker tool, 5X growth in Covid self-assessment and an 80 per cent increase in online consultations across the country led by the top 4 metros.
“With the pandemic, telemedicine and digital healthcare delivery have proven to be the norm and digital tools like MFine Pulse will play a major role in the way healthcare providers handle diagnostics, monitoring and treatment plans, be it at a hospital or at home,” said Ajit Narayanan, CTO, MFine.