LiveHealth has raised US $1.1 million from Nexus Venture Partners. The funds will be used to expand to more locations in India, on improving product and technology, and explore expansion to other countries. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform digitises medical reports from diagnostic labs and makes them available to patients as well as doctors on the cloud.
Cuurently, LiveHealth works with over 650 diagnostic centres in India and Africa. Besides digitising diagnostic reports, the platform can also be used to manage a patient’s overall medical record, financial transactions, as well as to keep a track of medical instruments and inventory. Doctors and other medical consultants get access to patient records through the platform, while patients can monitor health data via trackers.
The company claims to have digitised over 72 million medical records thus far, and delivers more than 50,000 digital medical records to both patients and doctors per day.
Spurt of funding in health tech companies in India
Over the past 12 months or so, a number of health tech companies have attracted investments. While these companies all fall under the broad category of health tech, individually each company is focused on different areas.
- Earlier this month, online fitness services provider HealthifyMe raised $12 million from Sistema Asia Fund and others. Besides individual users, HealthifyMe also works with companies and healthcare centres. Companies can tie-up with it to offer its employees diet plans, workout coaching and more. Similarly, healthcare centres, including individual physicians can tie-up with the company to offer additional services to their patients.
- This month, digital health startup healthi also raised $3.1 million from Montane Ventures. The company focuses on preventative healthcare, providing a set of tools to its users to make healthy choices.
- In September last year, myUpchar, which provides healthcare and wellness content in Hindi, raised Rs 2 crore from a consortium of angel investors. The company will use the funds to create content in other Indic languages such as Marathi and Malayalam.
- In June 2017, Grow Fit raised $4.5 million from the Manipal Education and Medical Group and existing investors. Grow Fit provides nutrition and diet counselling, skin and hair care remedies, counselling and therapy through its chat-based coaching programme. The company also offers an online health food store, which sells breakfast, smoothies, snacks, variety of attas, and special diet plans. It also runs its own kitchen through which it delivers healthy food to users.
- Bangalore-based SigTuple, which can be considered as a direct competitor of LiveHealth, raised $5.8 million from Accel Partners and others, in February last year. The company builds products for automated analysis of medical images and data to help with diagnosis, which includes Manthana, a medical intelligence platform, that consists of a data and machine learning backend combined with an real time reporting and API platform to offer analytics across data sets.
- Then there are the more established players like the online pharmacy 1mg, which raised funding last year. It also provides online diagnostic service which allows users to schedule a lab technician visit for collecting blood samples, and the results are sent to the user via post and email.
National Health Policy
Last year, the government of India had said that it plans to set up a National Digital Health Authority (NDHA), as part of the National Health Policy 2017. As part of this, the government will create an Aadhaar linked Health Information Network for sharing patient data, which will “link systems across public and private health providers at State and national levels consistent with Metadata and Data Standards (MDDS) & Electronic Health Record (EHR)“.
