How does it work?
To empower a larger population, including the ones who use smart phones, GUDMED’s team designed all services on the WhatsApp interface, making it extremely simple to use. A patient or caretaker just needs to type “hi” or “hello” to start a conversation with GUDMED, or scan a QR code to initiate the chat on GUDMED’s WhatsApp number. The WhatsApp interaction is powered by a secure conversational AI chatbot that assists the patient in uploading the prescription(s) and selecting services like:
Patients can easily request generic alternatives for prescribed medicines and save up to 70% on medicine costs through the government-sponsored Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana.
This generic medicine information is delivered via machine learning (ML)-based smart algorithms, ensuring a four-factor check on salt, form, power, and release.
Why digitise health records?
In today’s digital age, we leave our digital footprint across the internet and are easily able to track down our actions even a few years back. e.g. it’s very easy for an android user to look into Google history and tell when on which date and time they visited their favourite restaurant or movie theatre. However, it is difficult for a neuro patient to exactly share the date and time when they started having migraine pains or for a diabetic to share sugar levels and measurement trends and when to take medicine. They usually miss their medicine dosages and instructions given by the doctor.
More than 90% of doctors prescribe medicines without access to patients’ medical history and the diagnosis is made based upon anecdotal history narrated by the patient. Lack of access to digital health records is primarily driven by the extremely poor adoption of digital prescription writing tools by doctors, clinics and hospitals, as such tools could either impact doctors’ productivity or the doctors are not technologically savvy to use such applications.
As access to well-kept digitally recorded patients’ medical history can significantly improve the quality of diagnosis made by doctors, the national health authority under the Ministry of health and family welfare, Govt. of India, has started the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) to digitise health records, which can be managed using an ABHA number. GUDMED is enabling its patients with ABHA ID (ABDM) to align patient digital health records to their health records. such as: vaccination certificates, maternity records, infant vaccinations and other ongoing treatment.
GUDMED is a full-stack player in the digital healthcare domain and has extended its digital platforms to clinics and hospitals to transform them into smart OPDs without making any change in doctors’ ways of working. This enables clinics and hospitals to extend all patient care services to patients visiting OPD or getting discharged post IPD with minimal changes in the existing workflow of healthcare professionals or patients!
Impact
GUDMED launched its bouquet of services in November 2021, starting with general clinics (OPD’s) and then expanding to specialised clinics like neuro clinics, paediatrics, oncology clinics etc. They have also extended these services to over 3850 doctors across public and private healthcare institutions to digitise patient health records. Over the past 10 months, these services have been used by >180k+ patients, creating more than >250k+ digital prescriptions and records.
Prescription requests indicate the increased demand for Hindi prescriptions, with >175k+ patients requesting Hindi prescriptions; also, 58% of prescription requests reached out for generic alternatives. The demand for generic medicines is expected to grow as awareness increases.
Case study & testimonial
AIIMS, New Delhi
When AIIMS, Delhi, envisaged a research project to provide prescription transcription into local languages for their patients, they had very exacting requirements: the transcription should be extremely (>95%) accurate; there should be automatic simplification of the prescription to enable the patient to understand the doctor’s instructions and medicines/procedures being prescribed; and there should be an in-built reminder service to help remind the patients take medicines like anti-epileptics regularly. They also desired that various pain points be addressed automatically on patients’ first visit to the department(s) at AIIMS, Delhi. For example, the schedule and timings of the doctors; the map and layout of the various rooms; services available; waiting times and costs; along with disease-specific and patient-specific information. They did not want to create any new apps and wanted all the services to be available over WhatsApp and/or Facebook so that the maximum number of patients could use the service easily but securely. Moreover, they wanted all the services to be completely free for all patients! Gudmed volunteered to help design and scale the system and exceeded the project’s expectations in every way.
Team
The GUDMED initiative has been started by a group of doctors, technology innovators, and data scientists, and its operations are supported by a highly qualified team of pharmacists and doctors, ensuring the highest quality of digitised output with a secure, scalable, and robust backend, compliant with India’s health regulatory and IT security norms.
At GUDMED, the team strives to revolutionise India’s health and patient care services for the betterment of healthy India and make them accessible to all citizens. Jai Hind!
