Home Healthcare: A New Warren For Technology

Amol R Deshmukh, Founder and CEO, MedRabbits takes us through some deep, disruptive, and newly-dug burrows of home healthcare – like cybersecurity, insurance, robotics, drones, personalization, and telemedicine. He prescribes emphasis on clarity and human aspects – no matter how quickly technology runs in the evolving terra firma of healthcare. Let’s slide into these trenches.

Why Home Healthcare?

It all began with a personal journey during which I encountered difficulties in sourcing dependable home care services for a family member. Witnessing numerous gaps, delays, and operational inefficiencies within the existing call center model, I recognized a need for improvement. Initially, we established a training center to address various service needs, eventually refining it into tailored training solutions. We adopted a tech-first approach with this platform. We built a web-based app to bring speed and efficiency in this space. We believe in harnessing technology to redefine care, making it more personalized, convenient, and effective.

Did this model pick up momentum during and after the pandemic?

We launched around 2019 and the lockdown became a perfect timing for our platform. We got a real boost in adoption-readiness. What would have taken five years for people to get comfortable, with home healthcare happened in a few months. Covid changed the existing mindset. It also gave a fillip as well as some flip to healthcare insurance. Earlier, this segment’s insurance was an add-on but it changed to being a standalone rider. There was a lot of behavioral change as well. We moved from strength to strength and expanded beyond Pune to Mumbai and Chennai. We expanded to medical equipment, diagnostics, X-Rays, ECG and more. Today we stand at 10000-plus appointments, over 3000 customers, about 300 doctors, nurses, paramedics and presence across three cities.

Is it difficult to offer personalization while ensuring democratization – both being those main value elements that technology makes easy?

You have to find a middle ground. We are exploring two extremes – offering a high quality of experience while confronting limitations of scale. The question is – whether you are a service provider or a platform? There can be scale achieved through automation done in the right way while a health-tech platform can offer personalization with subscription models, concierge fees etc.

Is Telemedicine your competition?

It is complementary to what we do. Some patients need some form of Telemedicine. For example- video consultations or the option of home visits of some doctors.

We have recently seen the stir caused, and the questions raised, by the cybersecurity attack on ‘Change Healthcare’. How crucial and fragile is safety in this space?

From providing a SOS button to both nurses and customers, to admin alerts, location mapping, and other measures - we take safety very seriously. Also, a home environment is different from that of a hospital. We also invest in background checks, training on grooming and other soft skills that are required in such set-ups. As a customer of home care, I have gone through all such hardships and I wanted to make sure that everything is taken care of in this platform. The same rigor applies to the security of data. We have made sure our servers are in India. We have taken strong cyber-security initiatives. We have our own tech team. We have only outsourced the payment gateway part. We do not store data any longer than it needs to be stored for the service. Cyber-security is a core pillar of our platform.

Insurance is a strong adjacency for this market. Is it also evolving at the pace health-tech is?

There is some lag. It is a heavily regulated space and a model where ‘many pay for a few’. Fraud has always been a big concern in insurance - and that becomes tricky in the case of home care. Especially when there are only limited organized players in this sector- despite a diverse customer base. Because there are a lot of uncertainties at home vis a vis a hospital set-up. At the same time, we have to remember that home-care services can cover a 2/3^rd chunk of costs that arise in hospitals. In the next two to three years, we expect many positive changes.

After Paytm and Byju’s, the regulatory stance on start-ups with a ‘tech’ suffix has changed in India. Will it spill over to health tech too? Are you ready for a tougher regulatory posture?

We appreciate progress from a regulatory point of view. It is important to weed out players that are not ethical and address those that are unorganized – and those that can cause harm to the industry. In health tech, the exploration can be ‘technology’s play but the experience and delivery always boil down to a physical element. Our model is phygital and we take extreme care in making the experience human-friendly and responsible.

Your views on robotics – in home healthcare?

It is a technology that can play a great supporting role but it cannot replace a nurse. Technology will always augment humans. Like- how you still need a human sitting in an auto-pilot plane. I am excited about how drones can be used for supplying medical essentials at doorsteps – given the sophistication, accuracy and other advancements happening in India. Imagine organ transplants getting a new speed-boost because of drones! They can be a lifesaver. They can change so much for healthcare in rural India. More so, as the number of use cases increases, costs will come down.

Can you give a drone shot of home-healthcare before we wrap up? Will it replace hospital healthcare? Where will it go next in the coming two or three years?

It cannot be a replacement for hospitals. Especially as a lot of areas of expertise, surgeries and regulatory requirements lean towards hospitals. But a lot of cases, handled at hospitals, can be efficiently moved to a home set-up. It can help hospitals reduce a lot of costs and waiting time. I see many regulatory norms coming into place ahead. The place of service for home care may change too-like a transition place instead of a home. A home can have limitations of resources, space and other emotional aspects of the family. A transition place will emerge as a good option then, but home-care will grow as a segment – strongly and scalably.

By Pratima H