The size of Indian health market provides ample golden opportunities for startups.
The Indian healthcare market will rise to USD 280 billion by 2020 according to data released by India Brand Equity Foundation in July. By that time, the healthcare information technology market is expected to value at USD 1.5 billion. An indication of an Indian startup’s rise up is the adoption of data and IoT-based tech solutions, and this is what Doxper has done.
Founded in 2015, Doxper is a healthcare IoT startup which designs an IoT digital pen that can record, archive, and retrieve healthcare data for doctors and patients.
Doxper said that doctors can record their writing on encoded paper, and this data can then be transferred to the cloud, thus enabling multi-platform access. Patients can upload and share reports and files, allowing convenient monitoring of family health data and aiding in family health management.
AllTechAsia recently interviewed Shailesh Prithani, CEO of Doxper. He described how the digital pen can transform the way millions of doctors and patients record and communicate healthcare-related information.
AllTechAsia: How will Doxper’s recent USD 750,000 seed funding accelerate Doxper’s development in India? What is your specific market development strategy?
Doxper enables healthcare providers in diverse and even resource-limited settings to capture and analyze patient health information by combining our digital pen technology with proprietary analytics. No behavioral change drives adoption with clinicians, and Doxper’s digital ecosystem connects patients with care providers, enabling follow-ups and compliance for better outcomes.
Doxper accomplishes this with an innovative digital pen & coded paper solution that records and digitizes all the healthcare data at the time it is written. This simplifies the data capture process completely without changing the behavior of the doctors and care providers. Doctors are swamped with patients due to adverse doctor-to-patient ratios and often don’t have time to record all the healthcare information on a computer. The output data in digitized format from Doxper is shared with stakeholders for further processing and mining. Healthcare data in digital format is extremely important for all stakeholders; doctors, patients, and even community as a whole, as it can provide key insights into the state of the health and infrastructure. Doxper’s solution is extremely simple to use, needs very little to no training, and is very cost effective. It can also be implemented in any care setting anywhere in the world with great ease.
Doxper is growing at 20% month on month. The capital raised will be deployed to scale up operations and to further enhance the technology platform by improving and adding additional layers on top of the current stack including machine learning, handwriting recognition, and AI for better care outcomes. The vision is to make Doxper the de-facto choice for healthcare digitization in India and other emerging markets. We have our own sales force as well as appointing channel partners and distributors working to take Doxper to different geographies.
AllTechAsia: What inspired you to create Doxper? Do you have any stories to share?
On an average, a doctor gets a maximum of five minutes per patient. In that time if she is more concerned about using electronic devices than looking at the patient, then she loses her patient’s trust and rapport. It is better and far easier to change technology than change human behavior. We let the doctor carry on with her age-old practice of using a pen and paper to write prescriptions. No fumbling with keyboards and no tapping on tablets while they are talking to patients.
The next big wave of medicine will be precision medicine that involves customizing healthcare using data and analytics. If precision medicine is to take hold in the country, the base layer must be captured digitally. The clinical documentation and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) layers are broken in India and other developing countries. Unfortunately, data often doesn’t even exist today, and even if it does, it is inaccurate, incomplete, and fragmented. And the big missing piece is the doctors’ notes, which don’t exist in digital format anywhere.
AllTechAsia: What exactly is encoded paper? How exactly do the digital pen and encoded paper work? And where can the product better adopted?
The encoded paper has a pattern printed on the paper, which can be compared to a kind of two dimensional barcode. The paper is divided into a grid with a spacing of about 0.3 mm. The pattern can be printed onto almost any paper, using an industrial grade printer. The paper can be any shape or standard paper size. The ink absorbs infra-red light transmitted from the digital pen, the pen contains a receiver which interprets the pattern of light reflected from the paper.
We substitute the regular paper and pens with Doxper digital pens and encoded papers. This serves a dual purpose — it not only becomes an intuitive way to capture data digitally but it also helps the patient get her health records in a safe and secure way.
The are many scenarios in healthcare settings where pen hits the paper. For the near future we will focus on healthcare usage; the market is multi-billion dollars across the world. In healthcare, there are various scenarios in OPD (outpatient department), IPD (in patient department), ICU (intensive care unit), OT (operation theatre), Emergency/ Casualty, healthcare surveys in the field, etc.
AllTechAsia: Compared to Yoga Note and Kindle Note, what advantages does Doxper have? Those two also support the function of writing and recording data.
There are usability problems with writing on screen with stylus, the haptic feedback is not present and the user has to search on the screen where to write and navigate, hence diverting attention from the patient and task at hand. Compared to intuitive pen and paper use, flexed head and neck postures occur during prolonged tablet or mobile use and are implicated in neck pain.
(Top photo from Doxper)
Read More: Health-tech startup Doxper raises funding to scale operations for its data-recording pens
