New Delhi: Everyone takes care of their health, very few people take care of their health records. Parikh hard and sohit kapoor have had personal experiences of dealing with missing persons health records that created a lot of avoidable problems and stress for their families. Unlike the US, where the network of the health insurance Provider maintains medical records of patients, in India the only aggregator of medical records is the patient himself.
Given their personal experiences and a desire to help digitize healthcare in India, the duo decided to build a user-centric personal health locker, briefcasein late 2015 and launched in early 2017. This was after careers as investment bankers at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, where they each spent nearly a decade.
Kapoor is a Computer Engineer from Mumbai University and has an MBA from IIM-Bangalore. At Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, he led the corporate finance, M&A, and financial sponsorship coverage teams. Parikh is a Chartered Accountant and has an MBA from IIM-Bangalore. His role at BoA-ML involved covering clients in the consumer goods, building materials, metals and mining sectors. In addition to being colleagues, they had studied and worked together. So their relationship of nearly two decades was also a natural link to his business partnership.
Parij says briefcase is a complete healthcare technology platform anchored in the ayushman bharat digital mission (ABDM). “He ABDM, a key project of PM Narendra Modi, is a health information superhighway connecting all those associated with patient care, with the explicit consent of the patient. So if you’re seeing a doctor in a hospital and the doctor wants to access a health check done at any other lab, you can do it with a click,” says Parikh.
DRiefcase has created ABDM-focused solutions for patients, physicians and healthcare, as well as insurance companies.
“First of all, DRiefcase is the first ABDM-approved PHR (Personal Health Records) app in India. Users can manage their entire ABDM journey through DRiefcase: creating ABHAs, registering at hospitals via QR code, consent handling, and health records management. If ABDM is the UPI of healthcare, then DRiefcase is Google Pay,” says Kapoor.
Then there’s DRiefcase Connect, an ABDM integrated practice management solution for physicians. This platform acts as an ABDM gateway for individual physicians, polyclinics, and small hospitals and helps them improve productivity and manage their practice.
The opportunity
Parikh says the implications of truly connected digital healthcare are immense. Better quality of care, superior patient experience, cheaper and faster insurance processing, and ultimately universal health coverage.
“We have seen the transformative effect of UPI in recent years. We believe that ABDM will be even more transformative than UPI. The success of ABDM depends on adoption by various stakeholders, with patients being the key element here. PHR apps (such as DRiefcase) have a great opportunity as they will play a critical role in connecting the patient to the ABDM,” she says.
Kapoor says that numerous healthcare apps provide users with the functionality to store their medical records. But they expect the user to do all the hard work. So those apps never get off the ground.
DRiefcase has developed a proprietary method for scanning X-rays and MRI films at low cost.
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“We provide users with multiple easy options to upload their records (email, WhatsApp, courier pickup, and physical home scan). Plus, with our proprietary indexing feature, users can find any record in their account in less than 10 seconds. Given our understanding of the space, the ABDM architects invited us to help them design parts of the ABDM framework,” says Kapoor.
What also helps users is that DRiefcase has developed a proprietary method of scanning X-ray and MRI film at low cost. This allows users to store not only the reports but also the movies in their DRiefcase health locker.
Refusing to disclose the numbers, Parikh says DRiefcase had minimal revenue last year. According to Tofler, the company recorded around Rs 4 lakh in revenue in the year ending March 31, 2022, an increase of 65% from the previous year.
Ease of use for subscribers.
Waiting in line to get a doctor’s appointment at a Navi Mumbai hospital recently for her family member’s check-up, Kavita Kelkar noticed a board saying ‘scan and share’ for quick OPD registration. “I was curious about it so I asked around the desk and that’s when I heard about DRiefcase. I installed it and found that it is a time saver as you don’t need to queue in the long OPD line. You can just scan the QR code at the hospital and you’re done,” says Kelkar.
Kelkar, who has suffered from thyroid for many years, says managing his health records was a real challenge. “With multiple doctor visits, lab reports, and medication changes every few months, it was hard to keep all my health records organized. But briefcase application made my life easier. I have been using the app for some time now and find it very useful because all my family’s health records are now stored in DRiefcase and can be easily accessed with just a few taps on my phone,” she says.
bullish on ayushman bharat
DRiefcase is a free app and is available on PlayStore and AppStore. Users can create their ABHA in three quick steps. DRiefcase also has a field team in some of the largest hospitals in India. This team helps patients to onboard ABDM and use the QR code based OPD quick registration service which has been launched in around 500 hospitals across India.
The founders are confident that ABDM will transform healthcare in India and have aligned the business with India’s digital health mission. “ABDM’s first public use case, QR code-based fast OPD registration, was launched around November 2022, and within a short span of six months, DRiefcase has onboarded over a million users. Also, our ABDM connector is receiving a very positive response and several large and small companies have shown great interest in it,” says Parikh.
Sandip K Rane, Interventional Cardiologist, Founder Mumbai Heart Clinic, and promoter and director of the Asian Heart Institute, says he was particularly impressed with how DRiefcase Connect can help improve patient care and manage hospital workflow. “For example, the platform allows doctors to easily access patient records, which can help them make better diagnostic and treatment decisions. In addition, DRiefcase Connect can help clinicians communicate more effectively with patients, which can lead to increased patient satisfaction.”
Rane says that he has seen a significant impact in his work where he has not only streamlined the workflow, but has also ensured that the hospital has a digital record of all documents and videos. “We have a vision to be India’s first paperless hospital and DRiefcase is helping us achieve that goal,” says Rane.
Better access to a patient’s medical history can help health professionals of all disciplines to prescribe more appropriate and effective interventions.
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Digitization of healthcare in India is not a new phenomenon. Several companies have tried to digitize aspects of healthcare. There have been good results in some aspects: medical discovery, electronic pharmacy, teleconsultation. Some other aspects have not shown much improvement.
“All previous efforts have been largely isolated and driven by individual companies. ABDM is changing that. Digitizing healthcare is now a national, government-backed mission. We believe this bodes well for the ecosystem and we will see rapid developments in the digital healthcare space in India,” says Kapoor.
Electronic medical record and quality of care
The founders say that better access to a patient’s medical history helps health professionals in all disciplines to prescribe more appropriate and effective interventions. Furthermore, remote monitoring of patient health and continuity of care can lead to a significant improvement in the productivity of doctors and nurses, something important for a country like India, where many regions have extremely low per capita availability of professionals. Of the health.
According to Parikh, the greatest benefits that health professionals can obtain from health data are in the development of artificial intelligence to help doctors make better decisions. “The biggest challenge yet to be overcome in the large-scale implementation of AI in healthcare is the availability of statistically relevant data on every potential outcome to scientifically arrive at any forecast. While the use of AI as a decision-making tool has made some progress in certain therapeutic areas, we have only scratched the surface of its potential to help predict outcomes and increase the effectiveness of treatments,” he says.
health business
DRiefcase says the first 3-4 years of his journey was spent building the health locker market. “For the last 3 years, we have focused on ABDM. In this period, we have integrated three solutions in ABDM. Today, the DRiefcase PHR app has more than 1.2 million users. Additionally, our ABDM connector has propelled two companies on their ABDM journey,” says Parikh.
DRiefcase has three main revenue streams at the moment: the PHR app which provides healthcare services to users, DRiefcase Connect which has a subscription fee from doctors, and ABDM Connector which charges a license fee to companies.
Parikh says there’s a lot of interest in the ABDM Connector. As the company plans to launch healthcare services such as e-pharmacy and labs by integrating partners into DRiefcase, it is targeting a strong revenue build-up in the current year.
