PATIENT CAPITAL

Startups are using the latest technologies to cure the health care system of its many chronic ailments, while putting the patient first

- By NAINI THAKER

In a small hospital in Ahilyanagar, Maharashtra, a 13-year-old boy lay barely breathing. A suspected krait bite had left his pulse precariously weak. The hospital lacked someone trained to handle such emergencies. Help came from an unexpected source. Within minutes of intubation, doctors at the hospital were joined, virtually, by paediatric intensivists from healthtech startup Cloud-physician. The remote team guided the local staff through a series of interventions. After 12 days, the boy walked out of the hospital fully recovered. Cloudphysician's founders, Dhruv Joshi and Dileep Raman, are both trained doctors who recognised a universal challenge in health care. "Good quality care depends on having highly trained experts physically present. That model does not scale. You simply cannot have that level of expertise available everywhere, all the time," says Joshi. This realisation led to the founding of Cloudphysician in 2017. The Bengaluru-based startup infuses inpatient care with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered video. Its platform, RADAR, uses real-time computer vision and clinically trained models to enhance patient safety, address workforce shortages, and improve hospital compliance. On top of that is AINA, an AI layer that analyses data to generate autonomous clinical insights.

Cloudphysician is among a bevy of startups using technology to improve health care—from accessibility to drug discovery, and chronic disease management to emergency response. Orange Health is reimagining diagnostics. Twin Health is working on reversing chronic conditions such as diabetes. SigTuple brings robotics and AI to lab diagnostics. Mestastop is developing platforms to prevent cancer metastasis. StanPlus is streamlining emergency responses. And Niramai offers noninvasive, radiation-free breast cancer screening.