Sanohub Technologies Private Limited is a product company that facilitates personalised healthcare using Internet of Things (IoT)-based solutions. The company develops a platform – VitaCuro that enables continuous patient engagement for chronic care, remote patient management, remote diagnostics and medical value travel.
In an interview with EFY bureau, Sridhar Perepa, co-founder, Sanohub talks about the IoT market, deployment of IoT solutions in India, significance of IoT in healthcare, Sanohub’s IoT platform and many more.
Q. Many opine that IoT is just a buzzword that industry Gurus have coined to create hype? Do you agree with that line of thought? Or do you feel that IoT is opening an entirely new market?
We believe that the broad term of ‘digitisation’ encompasses many technologies and in the process some of the technologies don’t get their due recognition. We believe that IoT makes the systems not just get digitised but also makes them smarter and efficient, thus leading to market growth and giving significant value to customers.
Q. In your opinion, is the Government of India (GoI) playing any significant role in expanding the IoT market right now? If yes – how?
The government has a significant role to play in ensuring that the new systems deployed are smarter and efficient to drive the initiatives like Smart Cities, preventive healthcare and efficient logistics to double the agriculture income of farmers. All of these initiatives to make India great are driven by the GoI. Smart cities, efficient logistics and preventive healthcare are possible only through IoT. Thus, the GoI’s focus on these initiatives would help boost market expansion for IoT.
Q. What are your expectations from the GoI in terms of the initiatives they should take to make India an IoT-super power?
The government should take sustained initiatives to generate the market demand and provide support to startups to excel and innovate.
Q. Are you satisfied at the rate of deployment of IoT solutions in India?
We always like to see more in terms of deployment rate. However, the government has to fix a lot of infrastructure issues and hence we understand and respect their priorities. Triggered by the government, if private health care organisations like hospitals, insurance and corporate sector focus more on preventive health and continuous care, that would also lead to good demand in IoT solutions in healthcare.
Q. How do you see the IoT market evolving in the next 2-3 years?
In the next 2-3 years, global IoT market would go through changes as it comes out of hype (technology hype curve) to getting deployed and delivering value for businesses. During these times, the value expectations and implementation details would get ironed out for long time benefits of technology. It would also become the essential technology and would be used for artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications to deliver more value to businesses.
Q. Which industry segments do you believe will be driving a larger chunk of demand? Why?
Healthcare would be one of the segments which can solve the accessibility and affordability issues through IoT. As healthcare cost is increasing worldwide, the preventive healthcare becomes need of the hour. Using wearables or connecting medical grade blood pressure and blood glucose meters, the users can share the real time data with healthcare providers and will be able to get help and advice. Health and Activity Data Acquisition, through connected devices, eliminates human error thereby making accurate health triage and helps in effective healthcare. The hospitals can provide better post discharge care, thus improving the recovery of patients.
Q. What’s your bigger challenge – acquiring customers or acquiring talent? What’s your strategy in resolving the same?
Acquiring customers is slightly more challenging as the market needs to accept the new mode of working on real time data in healthcare and align to new service delivery.
Q. What is the estimated revenue of your biz that you’d attribute to IoT-related business?
Currently, a significant portion of our revenues comes from IoT-enabled healthcare delivery platform. Our platform, VitaCuro, enables continuous patient engagement for chronic care, remote patient management, remote diagnostics and medical value travel. So, all of these segments in healthcare delivery use the IoT platform in varied degree.
We continue to integrate many medical grade sensors and instruments to enable healthcare providers to effectively deliver and address accessibility and affordability of healthcare.
Q. What’s your strategy to create a differentiation for your solutions vis-a-vis your competitors?
We build our solution from the ground up and keep adding more sensors, rich data, analytics and intelligence for both healthcare providers and users.
Q. Any innovative strategy being planned or implemented by your team to create demand for your solutions amongst customers or channel partners?
We are working with other ecosystem players in healthcare delivery to enable the solution to reach as many people as possible. In that process, we have launched our IoT platform for pre-policy health checks for insurance companies. VitaCuro has delivered significant business objectives of health checks being completed at the convenience of insurance subscriber and reducing the complete medical report being available for insurance underwriting.
Q. Who is the key decision maker for you – the technology decision maker or the business decision maker? How do you balance the interests of both types of decision makers?
We tend to start our discussions with business decision makers, as our USP is to deliver business value with our technology. In this process, we also keep in touch with the technical decision makers to see if any customisations and application programming interface (API) integrations is needed for them to derive the business value.
Q. How would you describe your solutions to a non-technical decision maker at the clients’ end?
Healthcare delivery in today’s time has become more complex and confusing with internet savvy patients. The complexities of engaging patient and delivering quality care with convenience need a healthcare platform like VitaCuro. IoT-enabled VitaCuro can provide data to healthcare providers. The data related to physical activity like steps taken, quality of sleep and heart rate in real time from wearables and with BLE-enabled FDA/CE approved BP, blood sugar, weight, ECG and other parameters of patient, enable healthcare providers to provide chronic care easily. Ability to do teleconsultation and secured in-app text messaging bring the trust back between the healthcare provider and seeker.
Q. What’s unique about your solution or your firm for them to opt for it–vis-a-vis competitors?
Currently, most of the market leading solutions focus on appointment scheduling and billing. Our platform VitaCuro goes beyond appointment scheduling and billing and focuses on quality of healthcare.
