The firm, MedCords is set out to solve the problems for India, and so, it was born. The firm is making healthcare accessible, affordable and efficient for all by leveraging data-science and is becoming a ‘real time’ healthcare decision making tool for citizens, organizations and state governments. It generates insights for patients and doctors. Also, it is moving towards preventive healthcare by taking data-driven decisions.
The Trio
Nikhil Baheti, Saida Dhanavath and Shreyans Mehta are the Co-founders of MedCords. They are well-equipped with a perfect blend of ‘Local markets connect’ and ‘Expertise in Product & Technology’.
Shreyans Mehta has completed his BTech, MIT Manipal. He has previously worked with HeroMotoCorp & IndiaReads.com. He looks after market execution and strategy.
Nikhil Baheti has completed BE (Hons.) CS, BITS Pilani. He has previously worked with Oracle & Druva. He sees over the product vision, strategizing product market fit and technology.
Saida Dhanavath has done his M.Tech. CS, IIT Bombay. Previously, he was also working with Druva. He is the Chief Server Architect and looks after the entire cloud architecture and server designing, security and privacy, product development.
Shreyans and Nikhil were childhood friends, who extensively discussed their own personal experiences in inefficient healthcare services and its skewed access. While Shreyans comes from a family of doctors, Nikhil stayed adjacent to the biggest hospital of city – seeing patients’ plight every day. Nikhil discussed this with Saida and he too agreed to have bad experiences in healthcare services in Telangana. Over a period of time, the conviction to solve this problem became stronger. Finally they started executing by building a basic version and providing the needful and kept evolving along the way.
The Eureka Moment
In 2014, Shreyans’s Father, a practicing doctor was diagnosed with a major slip disc problem which was hampering his movement. At that time, most of the patients who came for consultation were from rural areas. Acknowledging the overall scenario, all the co-founders thought of embracing technology at its best with an ultimate aim to help the patients of rural areas. There came the Eureka Moment that ‘why not to scale it up and start working on the solution for it’. Thus, they started focusing to make processes more technology-enabled. Their distinctive research and extensive travel in rural areas enabled them to pin point major challenges in healthcare and this led to the foundation of MedCords.
Shaping the Firm Uniquely
For the firm, strategy was very clear; it wanted to be a single point destination for any healthcare query by a people (mostly rural). It wanted to be the first POC for their health related needs. It is unique in the sense that is focused only on rural people. The one thing that sets MedCords apart from other competitors is very strong focus on Bottom-of-Pyramid users where need of healthcare is much more and there are not many options for them.
MedCords have been awarded Best Healthcare Solution for its initiative in Kota smart city by urban development minister, government of India. It is a recipient of prestigious Bhamashah Techno Fund by government of Rajasthan. It has been recognized among the Tech 30 Companies by YourStory.
In-House Technology!
The ecosystem has been designed to cater to every citizen who has a mobile device. For People without smartphones : They avail all the services through local pharmacies who use “MedCords for Pharmacy App” where they get their health profile digitized and can also can take consultations. It also has a MedCords Lite app where in patients can view records and tag doctors whom they want to share their records. This is less than 2 MB app and it works in low network areas. It is also working on a full featured DIY app which will be for users who can operate it easily.
For Doctors and Hospitals, it has web application wherein they can see intelligently-organized historical information of one’s health profile and the patient can simply walk in with the clinic paperless. The doctor needs to be given access by the patients from their mobile devices.
Its Data Science Platform securely organizes the medical data of every patient and streamlines medical information about the patient in order to help the doctor efficiently understand and tremendously reduce misdiagnosis.
Competition Landscape
Many well-funded companies are solving the problem of doctor discovery, telemedicine and drug delivery – primarily urban. However, owing to the extremely diverse demographics one-size-fits-all approach in healthcare doesn’t work. Since it is catering to everyone in the pyramid very subjectively – patients, doctors, government and pharmacies; it has seen that the complete integrated ecosystem is not present currently.
Future Ideas
The company is planning to expand across Rajasthan and expecting to have more than 2.5 million users on MedCords by end of 2019. It is also making its data science platform robust to determine disease-symptom relationships, identification of health risk pattern in families. And, the best part is, it is also leveraging ML and AI to make doctor’s prescription writing experience simpler.
A Piece of Advice
“My advice is simple: Be focused. Be Grounded. Always ready to help.” – states Shreyans Mehta. Further, he added “There is and will always be future for new ideas, innovations in the ever-changing world.”
MedCords: Bringing the Impactful Change in Healthcare
