Last year, Manipal Hospitals partnered with Google’s Fitbit. The wearable device is offered to patients who get discharged from the hospital. To start with, they offered it to people who had cardiac procedures, and to those who had joint replacement procedures. These are two sets of patients who require an active life post discharge. Manipal integrated the device with the hospital’s backend systems to send reminders to patients to be active. If it finds a patient has not moved for 15 minutes, it sends an alert to get up and walk. “We did a pilot with about 200 patients, and when we compared their outcomes and recovery rates with those who were not on Fitbit, there was a remarkable difference,” said Dilip Jose, MD & CEO of Manipal Health Enterprises, at the Times Techies Tech Drives event last week. The country’s second largest hospital chain now is rolling the solution out across all its hospitals in India.
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Jose and Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, co-founder of new-age furniture venture Wakefit, were part of a discussion on how important technology has become to all businesses.
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Ramalingegowda said that every aspect of the seven-year-old company is automated and digitised. The furniture business is barely two years old, but already, the company is one of India’s biggest furniture makers. Wakefit says it has the country’s biggest furniture factory. “In our factories, at one end, someone chooses a design from the server in the cloud, and at the other end, somebody feeds the raw material, and then everything gets done automatically (from production to packing). We also track everything – what is the production mandate, what is the stock situation, where is the truck currently, where is every single product at every point in time,” he said.
On the consumer side, the attempt is to make the browsing experience completely personalised. And every data point is captured. “We are agile because we have more access to consumer behaviour. A traditional player would work through two or three layers of middlemen to reach the consumer, and once in 2-3 years they would do a consumer survey, and make a 2-3 year plan based on that. For us, consumer interaction is daily. They like a product, we hear it on social media within a few hours. They dislike something, we hear it on social media within a few minutes. They then call us, they talk to us, and we are able to respond instantly. Our data science and technology layer is what powers this whole journey,” Ramalingegowda said.
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Jose said Manipal has also tied up with Isansys, a company that has a patient status engine that allows patients in hospitals to be wirelessly monitored. Many times, he said, hospitals end up putting a patient in the ICU only for monitoring, and not really for intensive therapy. This is a waste of resources, and the patient ends up paying more to be in the ICU environment, when all he or she requires is monitoring. “With the new solution, we could do the monitoring outside of an ICU environment by giving a dashboard to the patient and the doctor. And in the event an intervention is required, we quickly transfer the patient to the ICU. It reduces the cost for the patient, reduces the dependency on ICU, and those beds can be used for other patients who genuinely need them,” Jose said. The solution can be extended to homes, and it’s probably a matter of time before that happens.
“Healthcare is not the first thing you think of when you think technology, but at the backend it is a lot of technology,” Jose said.
`Tech should core of any company’
Lenovo India managing director Shailendra Katyal said making technology the core of a company is the key to making it big. “Technology creates digital access and democratises access for innovation,” he said. A lot of technologies like Web3, he noted, were theoretical until a few years ago, but have now found practical applications. Data explosion with the advent of 5G will create a lot of opportunities in the technology space, he said.
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Everything in technology, he said, is moving towards becoming subscription-based, because companies like to be asset-light. And digitisation, he said, is bringing complexities like how to manage security and the workforce. “We now need more trusted partners who can provide end-to-end solutions,” he said.
