“Our next big launch is NAVI, a health assistant for doctors”

Navia Life Care is a health tech company building patient engagement platforms for medical providers, focusing on aspects of compliance, monitoring and communication. It is built on a standardized template, with options to customize using plug-and play feature sets, ensuring scalability, fast delivery times and replicability of medical records across the value chain.

In an exclusive interaction with the BioVoice, Mr Gaurav Gupta, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of Navia Life Care shared details about company’s current operations and future plans 

Please tell us about the idea behind foundation of Navia Life Care? Who are the co-founders and their background?

The idea behind Navia Life Care has come from very real problems faced by the founders. As a chronic disease patient himself and a healthcare professional, Kunal Kishore Dhawan realised that these problems are global in nature and they can be solved using technology. He, along with his cofounders, myself and Shourjo started Navia Life Care in 2016.

Kunal holds a Masters degree in Biotechnology and Management from Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and a Bachelors in Biochemistry from University of Delhi. He has worked in the healthcare and life sciences industry for the last 8 years. Our other co-founder, Shourjo is a Computer Science Engineer from University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, after which he gained experience in Software engineering at Freescale Semiconductors. Passionate about technology, he also holds a patent on network architecture to his name.

What is the key product or technology developed by the company and how has been the response from the market?

Navia Life Care’s flagship product is its Healthcare suite – Navia SMART, which is a Modular, Integrated and Network-enabled product suite helping providers improve clinical and financial outcomes.

Navia “smartifies” the providers by offering them a comprehensive solution that can be plugged in to their existing IT architechture. It is the platform for medical providers to leverage technology to build, maintain and improve relationships with their patients. It is continuously being improved, with greater focus on utilizing data analytics to provide insights and knowledge back to the customers, along with implementing Artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to make our customers more aware and provide them with greater ease-of-use. As for the customer segments, we are strongly encouraged by the response we have received to our product by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies.

Case in point, a 75-bedded multi specialty hospital in East Delhi has implemented Navia SMART, they just plugged and played Navia SMART in their IT systems and have become a SMART hospital. They have significantly improved their patient engagement, increased the care quality and improved revenues by using this easy-to-use dashboard for doctors, administration, marketing and front office teams.

For a biotech or a pharmaceutical company, Navia SMART offers a platform to interact with patients and providers by developing AI-enabled automated patient support programs focussed on increasing medication compliance, brand loyalty and patient outcomes.

Who are your major clients in India? What kind of opportunities are you are looking at?

Our approach with clients is a partnership based one, wherein we try to create value for each other and the patients together. Our client partners include over 50 hospitals, 250 doctors and over 100,000 patients in India. We have hospitals ranging from 20 beds to 500 beds on Navia SMART. We are also working with a Delhi based pharmaceutical company. Our growth has been phenomenal; we have been doubling every quarter. The healthcare ecosystem is very excited about new technologies, we receive product demonstration requests everyday from hospitals, pharma and biotech companies from across India.

Tell our readers about your current line of activities including partnerships? What are your upcoming plans?

We have partnered with some of the biggest names in the industry for distribution of the product far and wide to hospitals and patients. Our approach is to develop highly credible channel partners who can help us in leveraging their network in the industry to increase our reach.

We are one of the frontrunners when it comes to innovation and disruption. We work on the principles of design thinking, understanding the changing requirements of our users, and of the industry as a whole. We innovate based on the feedback we receive from the market. Our team majorly consists of young engineers and medical professionals, who are always excited to create new and useful features that bring value in our customers’ lives.

What have been the key milestones of the company?

Navia Life Care was founded in 2016, we diligently worked on the product development for the over a year. Right after that NASSCOM picked us and we were awarded People’s choice award for the Most Innovative and High Potential product at the Nasscom Product Conclave North 2017. We are also the best healthcare startup and second best overall startup in India by Seed Stars, Germany.

We have been featured extensively in several leading business, startup and healthcare journals – both in print and online. This includes Yourstory, Business World, Entrepreneur India, Inc42, Insights, Healthcare Executive etc. Kunal was included in the Healthcare Executive 30 Under 30 2017 earlier this year.

How has been the company’s financial performance in current and last fiscal years?

After going to market last year, we have grown phenomenally, doubling our revenue numbers every quarter. We expect to continue this growth for a foreseeable future.

Please share the future outlook for your company? What will be your long-term agenda?

Healthcare and pharmaceutical industries have been traditionally R&D heavy and have been thriving based on the innovations they do. Although these industries are fairly nascent with respect to information technology related innovations. Hospitals have relied heavily on manual processes, right from taking patient records to scheduling, and from managing internal processes of patient movement to communication between different stakeholders. Technology enable patient support programs have shown a significant impact in the pharmaceutical industry in developed markets. Another area of impact has been use of data analytics to improve hospital efficiency, which is widely successful in the West. Now AI is also coming up to be very promising in healthcare and is showing early impact.

Navia Life Care is an innovation driven company, we want to remain on the fore-front of healthcare technology innovation globally. Our product pipeline is highly innovative and robust, we are developing solutions that work on deep learning and would aid a healthcare provider in every aspect of their work.

Our next big launch is NAVI, a health assistant for doctors that helps them in automatically writing the prescription by a smart speech-to-text algorithm. Ultimate aim of NAVI would be to assist doctors in every aspect – diagnosis, prescription, referencing and communication.