India is witnessing an unprecedented surge in demand for E-healthcare platforms post coronavirus outbreak. Several health tech startups have come up that are addressing various customer pain points.
Diagnostics is the starting point in healthcare delivery and is fundamental to all the steps thereon. The diagnostics industry is also not untouched by what is referred to as the fourth industrial revolution. Developments in the fields such as biotechnology, genetics, and nanotechnology, are leading to an accelerated rate of change that generates new and very disruptive technologies. With advances in genomics, personalized medicines, and patient-centric approaches, AI-based data-driven tests have the potential to address many customer pain points. These factors are forcing the clinical laboratories to adjust and change their processes.
India’s diagnostic industry is one of the fastest-growing services in the country estimated at USD 9bn (around INR 675bn), still, the industry is highly fragmented and under-penetrated. There are 1.1 lakh medical laboratories in the country, whose test reports determine over 70 percent of medical decisions and of these, just about 1,039 are accredited and around 80-85 percent of these labs are unorganised. There is a rising need for this scenario to change and a more user-friendly, better, and transparent service/delivery is available to the user.
India will have 1 billion smartphone users by 2026 with rural areas driving the sale of internet-enabled phones, a Deloitte study suggests. The country had 1.2 billion mobile subscribers in 2021, of which about 750 million are smartphone users. Smartphone‐based diagnostics thus has the potential to lead to decentralization and democratization of clinical laboratory tests. It can allow the delivery of precise diagnostics in remote areas and limited resource settings practically possible.
Some startups are using standard smartphone cameras and a dipstick for urine tests and an app to identify different health indicators. All the patient needs to do is take a photo of the dipstick against a color card, and the app then gives an instant analysis.
NeoDocs, a Mumbai based Startup, is working on this use-case. The company is using technologies such as Lateral Flow Assay and Colorimetric Assay for this. Lateral flow assays (LFAs) are the technology behind low-cost, simple, rapid, and portable detection devices. It is a paper-based platform for the detection and quantification of analytes in complex mixtures, where the sample is placed on a test device and the results are displayed within 5–30 min. Colorimetric Assay involves the generation of color by chemical/biochemical reaction between target analyte and reagents. The intensity of the resulting color can be quantified using imaging tools and processing software.
The computer imaging technology is used to analyze color-coded slides with a dipstick — a plastic strip treated with chemicals that changes color when dipped in a sample. The color-coded slide is then analyzed by the app using artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform medical tests in the cloud. To account for the type of camera, the lighting conditions, and other variables the app uses machine learning. The results of the tests are then automatically sent for clinical follow-up.
NeoDocs has started with urine-based tests that can be used for issues starting from Urinary Tract Infection, Pregnancy, nutrient deficiency, Chronic Kidney Disease, Jaundice, etc. It plans to expand to blood and saliva-based tests in the near future.
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