EMR and other digital tools open opportunities for healthcare providers to make informed and effective decisions

Doctors are at the centre of healthcare Technology, with that vision HealthPlix, health IT startup company helps doctors to improve patient health outcomes by supplying clinical decision support at the point of treatment using assistive AI-powered EMR software. With the broadest coverage across specialties and regions, HealthPlix is now one of the leading EMR players in India. They intend to construct a digital healthcare stack that would power the end-to-end clinic and patient administration for the doctors.

We spoke to Gaurav Mathur – Head of Engineering, HealthPlix Technologies, on how HealthPlix is driving innovation in the healthcare sector. Excerpts from an interview:

What do you think about the Indian healthcare industry's reluctance to adopt technology? How should this be addressed?

With a population of 1.5 billion, India is the second most populous country in the world. Traditionally doctors have been used to the pen and paper approach, with parts of the country still yet to go digital. The rapid growth in adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR’s) in India is digitizing health records in the country for good.

Telemedicine, remote consultation, online consultations have become a new norm. Considering that doctors are the most influential decision-makers in healthcare, enabling them with proprietary digital tools is essential. It is closely related to providing personalized healthcare. 

EMR and other digital tools open opportunities for healthcare providers to make informed and effective decisions. Moreover, with EMR's doctors are moving towards an organized healthcare system from an unorganized one that existed decades ago. With technological advancements growing at rapid pace, technology in general has been the single most important factor to advance healthcare for emerging countries like India. 

The UPI moment for healthcare is in front of us and technology is playing the central role across countries advancing the movement and is the only facilitator of infrastructure required to deliver healthcare beyond boundaries.

However, the goal should be to build tech enabled capabilities, analytical tools and platforms that allows doctors to monitor clinical KPIs in an interactive and dynamic manner. With consolidated and interoperable patient data, precision healthcare will become possible across preventive and curative paradigms. Novel initiatives like ABDM by Govt. of India will complement and allow doctors to deliver the much-required precision healthcare.   

Describe HealthPlix contribution to doctors' productivity and efficiency.

Today, a growing number of companies, mostly startups, are leveraging newer technologies to build products that help doctors store and analyse data and apply insights from those analysis. HealthPlix is a company that brings technology to the heart of healthcare – doctors. 

With one click view of a patient longitudinal health journey, doctors today are saving time and delivering personalized care. Further, specialty driven EMR’s are helping specialty doctors solve unique acute and chronic cases in the country. 

The EMR learns from the usage patterns of the doctors, with an effective use of personalisation machine learning models and we learn from every keystroke that the doctor makes. The collective learning models from the overall doctors on the platform helps in identifying patterns that are most effective.

Further, using assistive AI powered EMR software, HealthPlix empowers doctors to drive better health outcomes for their patients by providing clinical decision support at the point of care. For Ex; Drug to Drug Interaction (DDI) - An intuitive feature that sits on the HealthPlix EMR to help doctors recall molecule-to-molecule interactions at the time of care. The suggestive feature is designed for doctors in India and targeted to decrease their time taken to write a prescription.

What are the ways that HealthPlix is driving innovation in the healthcare sector?

HealthPlix has built the foundational infrastructure needed for a digital healthcare ecosystem to thrive. Our platform solves for ecosystem stakeholders like hospitals, med-tech players etc by empowering the heart of healthcare - doctors. 

Second, we are helping doctors deliver precision healthcare by providing meaningful insights at point of care by harnessing superlative tech - AI/ML. Our industry first products like Drug-to-Drug Interactions, SmartScan, Patient Summary Dashboard are sound examples of how well we have innovated to empower the key stakeholder - Doctors. 

Ex: As per Indian Medical Association, ~1Mn people die yearly due to critically Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs). HealthPlix DDI feature within the EMR proactively nudges doctors for medicine-to-medicine interactions between 2 or more medicines in a prescription in real-time. The intention is to empower our doctors to prescribe medicines without the fear of any complications.

Third, the HealthPlix platform is the trusted and go-to platform for doctors to solve chronic diseases in the country. Our proprietary Machine Learning (ML) models leverage past patient health information to nudge the doctor to gather inputs critical for diagnosis. The ML algorithm tries to correlate the inputs with critical risk factors to predict whether the person would develop a chronic disease. This result can help the physician in diagnosis leading to better clinical outcomes.

Lastly, we are the first to come up with mobile-first solutions for doctors in India.  We were the first engineer Mobile EMR for doctors in India, which is a clear winner for doctors in rural Bharat. By large all our efforts are driven towards ensuring consistent internet access across cities, so doctors can use their EMR seamlessly.   

What is your opinion of the Indian healthcare sector? What are the benefits of AI-driven products to the industry?

HealthPlix AI-EMR helps in improving the quality of healthcare provided by doctors at the point of care. It is simply because of the platform that enables Doctors to access patient health records in just a click, making it a boon for a country as vast and diverse as India. 

One of the things that sets us apart is our continued efforts to improve the efficiency, scalability, and reliability of doctors' practice, with new technologies and advanced features that support them in making the right decision at the right time. Features like SmartScan (AI-OCR), Drug-to-Drug interaction, Doctors Insight Dashboard is a testament of the tech evolution of the Indian healthcare ecosystem with HealthPlix leading this transition from the front. 

Artificial intelligence has been a cornerstone of several sectors for many years. In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning has significantly increased in Indian healthcare settings. Modern digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can be used to diagnose and prevent diseases through the collection and analysis of numerous vital signs. It might even speed up the development of life-saving medications. 

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, according to a study by the Global Burden of Disease partnership. In order to tackle this, timely diagnosis and proper management of such chronic illnesses is crucial. For this, there needs to be a structured way of analysing health records, trail reports, and doctor's notes which is not as tedious as manually extracting patient data from unstructured sources.  

In such cases, AI-based infrastructure such as HealthPlix EMR solution allows for interoperability with external data sources. It offers a wealth of clinical data that is structured and can be utilised to accurately diagnose CKD and address other significant healthcare issues for Bharat.

How do technologies like EMR are helping in addressing the challenges of this era in the Healthcare industry?

EMR solves the foundational problem of creating the much-needed digital health infrastructure for doctors and the ecosystem. Second, the evolution of EMR has been impressive when it comes to accessibility and interoperability of patient health information. Third, with doctors slowly migrating from traditional to modern healthcare with EMR, driving population-level health outcomes is now a reality. 

We firmly think that by making digital technologies available to help doctors when administering medicines, the present crop of health issues may be effectively controlled, and esp. to be able to deliver precision healthcare. 

Our approach to healthcare engineering using superlative technology is solving for 3 key issues

a) Building mission critical infrastructure for the ecosystem

b) Given the burden on new age diseases, empowering doctors - key stakeholder in the ecosystem

c) Making healthcare affordable and accessible for patients.