Diagnostic services contribute to only ~ 5% of the overall healthcare industry.
However, their critical nature can be assessed from the fact that the remaining 95% of expenditures are based on the results obtained.
One of the challenges in the use of diagnostic solutions is that the patients need to wait for at least a day to get the reports after sample collection. This induces a delay in the diagnosis and forces multiple trips to the doctor. This plus the fact that it often needs trained personnel to do the diagnostics – creates a cost and deterrence towards the diagnosis.
Additionally,74% of existing diagnostic labs are primarily concentrated in large urban centers and hospitals, leaving vast swathes of rural India uncovered. This leaves the majority of the Indian population hanging by the thread when it comes to accessibility to diagnostics.
Tier 3, and Tier 4 cities and rural areas - have shown a great demand for asset-light diagnostic solutions which are portable, affordable, and easy to use for personnel with little medical knowledge.
Doctors too resonate with this problem as the provision of appropriate diagnostics is necessary and critical in providing healthcare services.
I encountered this diagnostic gap, while I was working as a doctor in rural Karnataka. Referrals to bigger hospitals, (the nearest being 1.5 hours away) for diagnostic or treatment facilities, were inevitable.
My first referral case - one late Monday afternoon. We (my senior and I) had a mother come in with a newborn baby. We had recently helped her deliver. She complained that the baby seemed lethargic, wasn’t feeding well, and was running temperature. We did a detailed check. We needed some diagnostics done to choose a line of treatment. The mother felt uncertain about traveling to an urban hospital for diagnostic tests and asked for treatment directly. We gave the first line of care and
asked her to keep an eye out for other symptoms. We did not want to put in strong medication for a baby without diagnostic confirmation.
She came in again in 48 hours. By this time the baby’s condition had worsened. We didn’t have a choice but to rush an ambulance with a doctor and nurse to a tertiary hospital. We later came to know from our colleagues that the baby was diagnosed with sepsis and was admitted to ICU.
Care could have been provided earlier.
Spotsense is bringing changes in the diagnostic space by creating rapid bedside diagnostic kits.
Its first product was “Droolie” – a simple test that uses saliva to detect sepsis in neonates. The innovation is exciting. Regular sepsis is tested with blood markers – which requires skilled nurses for blood collection, and expensive lab set-up – an overall time-consuming process.
The company then introduced - Sepscore, an AI-based clinical decision support for early recognition of sepsis. Now the diagnosis of sepsis is based on data gotten from clinical examinations (e.g. pulse, temperature, etc..) along with biomarker data obtained from Droolie.
This helps to not only identify sepsis but also categorize and map it to the treatment protocol.
The total time required for this diagnostic test is 20mins – enabling doctors and nurses to take treatment decisions faster.
The company has also developed diagnostic kits ranging from basic blood tests (like blood typing, TSH, etc) to those for oral cancer screening. The test kits come with a reader which can qualitatively and semi-quantitatively detect the biomarker. This also makes the process human error-free.
In most cases, these solutions prove to be adequate in the identification of diseases or their symptoms. This would help boost coverage for preventive care – making it more affordable for the masses as they don’t have to go to cities or hospitals to get them tested under normal conditions.
Smart solutions like these, aim to serve as the first line of diagnostic services, especially in non-urban areas where easy and convenient access is missing. The complicated cases the patients can be referred to hospitals for advanced and invasive check-ups. Yet, these are fewer, and the diagnosis becomes faster and less costly.
Point-of-care (POC) diagnostic devices that integrate AI, data analytics, and other smart technology to deliver faster and more precise diagnostic results are being accepted at a wider scale. The healthcare world now is inclining towards using advanced technology to build agile, mobile, affordable, and accurate smart diagnostics solutions.
The future of diagnostics in India is one to observe keenly. Home-grown Med-Tech start-ups are creating a new and growing trend of digitally enabled diagnostic facilities. These smart solutions can be potential game-changers.
References
https://nhm.gov.in/index1.php?lang=1&level=2&sublinkid=1218&lid=192
https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotsense-healthcare-private-limited/?originalSubdomain=in
Similar companies
https://healthcubed.com/
http://fastsensediagnostics.com/
https://www.salignostics.com/
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