Healthcare centres need to use data and digital solutions to make doctors connect with consumers: Rohit M A, co-founder and MD of Cloudnine

There are only 25,000 gynaecologists catering to 250 million women between the ages of 18-35 in the country. This is what World Bank data tells you, and the opportunities available in the healthcare space for reaching individuals is considerably large. There is no way that doctors could engage with most women during their pregnancy. Technology today hopes to solve this issue, enabling doctors to reach out to and support pregnant women. The opportunity in India has two components- the urban side and the rural side. Data available with maternity care chain Cloudnine shows that there are 70 million women who will need maternal care over the next five years. There are 1.5 million babies born in India every month and technology solutions are still some way away from solving reach and engagement for expecting mothers. The problems begin with the lack of data, but Cloudnine wants to change all that.

"At our company, we hope to make a difference by providing complete maternity solutions," says Rohit M A, MD of Cloudnine Hospitals. He says that today, hospitals do not capture the data to improve healthcare and better a mother's experience. "We are changing the way doctors look at maternity care by using technologies that can give them a full view of each an expecting mother's condition to medicine and the experience in the hospital," says Rohit.

In fact, institutions like the International Finance Corporation (IFC) have been working with Cloudnine to engage with innovative startups in healthcare to improve the quality of data and engagement with mothers to be. The main objective is to help hospitals focus on bringing out technologies that can provide care for women through mobility applications. Cloudnine is looking at this in three parts.

It works with medical equipment manufacturers and platform service providers like GE to provide connected care in incubators for babies.

It has created an incubation centre for startups to make hospital record management systems responsive. Startups will use Cloudnine's APIs to build services to reach customers. Some of these services include information pertaining to day-to-day nutrition, doctor access with real time monitoring of the health.

The third piece of the puzzle is about making doctors use the digital world to engage patients better and deliver care faster.

According to the World Bank, India has the youngest median age population at 27. Healthcare centres like Cloudnine, Apollo Hospitals and Narayana Hrudayalaya are all piloting with startups to make healthcare go digital.

A big shoutout to all our sponsors – Zendesk, Axis Bank, Sequoia Capital India Advisors , Digital Ocean, Microsoft, AWS, Akamai, Target, Verisign, Kerala Startup Mission, Brand Launch Centre, Tork and Blink.