The recent disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data as well as computer vision are revolutionizing the healthcare system across the world. It involves digital care programs to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery with personalized care. The combination of AI and big data is creating an intersection between technology and healthcare for the utmost caring of different types of patients in all kinds of hospitals or clinics. It has created a huge scope for telemedicine and telehealth as well, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here is an exclusive interview with Nidhi Jain, Founder, and CEO of KareXpert where she explains how India's first-ever SaaS-based integrated digital healthcare platform is focused on digitally connecting multiple kinds of hospitals to make healthcare accessible and affordable to the Indian society.

– A brief about KareXpert

With the vision to digitally empower hospitals, Jio-backed KareXpert is India's first SaaS-based integrated digital healthcare platform with the aim of connecting 100,000 hospitals in the next five years. The company offers end-to-end digital empowerment to hospitals and healthcare providers through its comprehensive range of AI-enabled, cloud-based, and mobile-ready solutions that are designed for coordinated patient care, optimize operational costs and increase revenue. KareXpert advanced webscale software technology stack is fully secured and certified by PwC.

– Please highlight the funding you received from Reliance Jio

KareXpert received funding from Reliance Jio in 2018, for the development of the core technologies and healthcare stack. KareXpert developed the entire stack with No-coding architecture for microservices, databases, and the front end. The system of interaction, the system of intelligence, and the system of records are its prime building blocks. The healthcare stack is ready with commercial offerings in the market now.

– What type of services KareXpert provides?

With 50+ modules and 450+ applications, KareXpert is the first Indian company to offer a most exhaustive portfolio for hospitals. The service includes advanced HIMS, EMR/EHR, LIMS, RIS/PACS, pharmacy, connected ambulance, advanced BI, MIS, e-Claim, telemedicine, inventory & SCM, queue management, counseling, and branded mobile apps as a pre-integrated stack.

– How KareXpert is different from the other players/competitors in the industry?

Competition has taken the product or point solution approach that is largely siloed, while KareXpert has taken a platform-based approach connecting the hospital and all departments with golden workflows where patient engagement is taken care of at every step. KareXpert also connects hospitals to the healthcare ecosystem such as third-party software systems, medical equipment, and patient aggregators platforms bringing a complete B2B2C offering to the hospitals as a one-stop solution.

– How is COVID inclined towards your business and market?

COVID-19 has created a great need for hospitals to think about their IT at a holistic level rather than a point solution, move to floud, enable mobile health, and have 24×7 support available remotely. KareXpert's transformative platform-based approach coupled with cloud-native, mobile-first, AI-ready approach was envisioned many years back. The pandemic has helped us by making our sales process easy as customers themselves are looking for platform-based solutions with cloud-based solutions. We have many marquee customers with whom we have already implemented and are soon to go live.

– What kind of hospitals are you planning to cater to?

For us, hospital size doesn't matter, as we are on an elastic cloud with a SaaS-based commercial model. We have segmented the entire Indian hospital market into six segments (corporate, large, medium, small, nursing home, and eye hospitals) with different silver, gold, platinum, and titanium packages serving all kinds of hospitals from 1500 beds to 10 beds. KareXpert's No-Coding Platform approach coupled with DevOps/CICD agile software development brings Change Request (CR) at the speed of business requirements.

– Highlight the challenges you face when you reach out to a hospital

Sometimes, understanding the right decision-maker is challenging in the hospital and some of the stakeholders are not available online so directly connecting them is an issue, and some are afraid of migrations as it's a mammoth project wherein projects have been developed and integrated over the years with no documentation. To mitigate these risks, KareXpert has designed and developed a pending patent ZTP (Zero Touch Provisioning) approach where an entire hospital of any size can be created in less than 30min. This used to take three months.

– Current Industry Scenario

Indian Healthcare IT is in its infancy stage with mostly operating as a manual process with lots of inefficiencies. According to analysts, the Indian healthcare IT market will be touching 5% of $200Bn USD i.e., ~$10Bn USD with 30%+ CAGR in three year-time. This exponential growth is due to the low digitization of the Indian healthcare market.

95% of Indian hospitals don't use EMR/EHR with Excel being used for their day-to-day work rather than any health technology platform. 90% of medical equipment is not connected to any system that has continuous data loss as there is no data lake conceptualization for AI-readiness.

At KareXpert, we are enabling these untapped markets to make them globally competitive from a digitization perspective. We need to make sure hospitals are empowered with the right technologies to make them future-ready and make them a part of the healthcare ecosystem rather than create a silo and closed system that will make us ready for healthcare accessible affordable with quality for billion population.