A Doctor, an Engineer, and a Professor Join Hands To Start TechJeeva
We spoke to co-founder Thejus Joseph on how it all started, their growth so far and their ambition.
Two students and a professor
Safir and Thejus, childhood buddies, grew up to choose careers in medicine and engineering respectively. At the engineering college, Thejus met assistant professor Sunil, whose passion was teaching and supporting students with an aptitude in engineering. They worked together as a team, Safir brought in his medical knowledge, Sunil his technical know-how in robotics and Thejus managed the whole show. This was born their student initiative: TJ: A SILICON TOUCH TO HEAL. Speaking of the beginning, Thejus says, “Safir and me were always convinced that a common platform with medicine and engineering would bring about substantial changes to the medical industry and with Sunil on board on the technical side, we knew we had it covered on all grounds - medical, engineering and management.”
Four years after the student organization was set up, the initiative got incubated into a company with the support of Startup Village, India’s first public-private partnership business incubator focused on student startups.
Transformation into a company
“At Techjeeva, we lay special emphasis to robotics & embedded s/m development,” says Thejus of their core competency. Techjeeva provides hospital management solution and their newly launched initiative ‘GRAPES’, integrates all common facilities in a hospital including data storage in the form of computerized medical records. This integrated service, Thejus believes, is both user friendly and time saving, and thereby, likely to ‘revolutionize the solutions for the medical industry’.
They also offer customized solutions and services. Their hospital management system and GRAPES are currently their revenue source besides the annual maintainence contracts, they undertake for hospitals. Speaking of the pricing, Thejus says, “it is related to the size of hospital and the AMC that the hospital needs and it can run into crores”.
Thejus believes that cloud computing is the next trend in hospital management software and Techjeeva, with its solutions, is aiming to leverage that trend to become a globally recognized company in healthcare sector.
What makes it so difficult
Like many other startups, the biggest challenge for the company has been gaining visibility and dealing with a market reluctant in adopting a new technology. The other herculean task is the process of converting existing physical records into a digital format, which, Thejus says, takes a lot of time since their systems work on key information flowing across the hospital system that involves various levels of users. “When the patient information is not controlled centrally, and many end-system users have access to it, it becomes critical to address issues of privacy, confidentiality and misuse or mishandling,” says Thejus.
However, with the increasing demand for quality care and rising competition among small hospitals, adoption of technology for driving processes smoothly is likely to be the next big thing in the healthcare industry. Despite the challenges, it is this opportunity that the founders of Techjeeva believe is the ‘billion dollar’ opportunity.
[Image Credit: Visual Photos]
