India’s efforts to digitise health records face a fundamental problem. A skewed doctor to patient ratio means healthcare practitioners get only a few minutes with the sick. In these few minutes, it is unreasonable to expect the doctor to do both – consult and digitise medical observations and recommendations.
Working on his research in the domain of precision medicine and oncology informatics, Randeep Singh saw that doctors struggled with gadgets for data entry and recording of healthcare data. Further digging into the facts made him understand the inherent gap prevalent in this sector. An idea took shape and Doxper was founded with an aim to up the ante in data storing for hospitals and healthcare professionals.
“We could have, for once, undertaken the painful exercise of digitising these paper files, but one centre or a few hospitals wouldn’t have sufficed. For what we envisioned to achieve, it needed more than that, it needed a paradigm shift,” recalls Singh, who doubles up as Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of the company he set up in 2015.
He was joined by Shailesh Prithani who had worked with an oilfield services company, Schlumberger, for 10 years and Pawan Jain who had been a programmer for the most part. While Singh and Jain knew each from their time together in IIT Bombay, Prithani got introduced to them via a common network and decided to hop onto the bandwagon as well. “We decided to step into this industry and do something that the doctors had been longing for. We brought zero behaviour change approach to ease the doctors’ daily clinical practice and eventually succeeded in 2016 January when we signed up our first paying customer. Since then it’s been a journey,” reminisces Singh.
Pen and paper code
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So how exactly does Doxper claim to make the lives of doctors simpler? Powered by cloud computing, machine learning and AI, the company essentially positions itself as a digital pen and encoded paper-based clinical documentation system. Pens and paper in a hospital are replaced with Doxper pens and encoded papers. All that the doctors and medicare professionals need to do is to write using the Doxper pen on the encoded papers. We wanted to innovate an altogether new data input modality for healthcare. After all, digitisation forms the backbone for efficient, fast and sustained growth in any industry,” he says.
So how exactly does Doxper claim to make the lives of doctors simpler? Powered by cloud computing, machine learning and AI, the company essentially positions itself as a digital pen and encoded paper-based clinical documentation system. Pens and paper in a hospital are replaced with Doxper pens and encoded papers. All that the doctors and medicare professionals need to do is to write using the Doxper pen on the encoded papers. “We wanted to innovate an altogether new data input modality for healthcare. After all, digitisation forms the backbone for efficient, fast and sustained growth in any industry,” he says.
The product is customisable and can come in handy for individual clinics, small and large hospitals and even in public health. The Doxper workflow, which is presently patent pending, uses proprietary handwriting recognition and clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms at the backend.
For healthcare organisations, it helps in higher compliance via record keeping, driving higher patient engagement, offering continuity of care in cases where patients lose or forget their case files as well as helping patients comply with their treatment plans through automated reminders. Moreover, Doxper claims, the data can also help in improving operational efficiencies resulting in higher RoI in terms of monetary value.
Source: Economic Times