After 24 years in the media industry, why Divya Laroyia decided to start up in the healthtech space

After 24 years as a working professional, Divya Laroyia, Co-founder of MyHealthcare, realised that there comes a point when you search for a purpose in all you do.

“I never imagined I would be an entrepreneur - I was used to the comfort and security of a ‘job’ where a salary was assured. But when I had to make a choice between switching careers or getting deeper into healthcare, I opted for the latter. It’s the closest I could have come to my childhood dream of being a doctor - being in the field, making a difference to someone’s life, without the needles,” she says.

It was a huge leap of faith after spending 24 years at NDTV, focussed on leading networking operations, new product design, branding and building new digital platforms.

In 2017, she left NDTV and teamed up with friends Shyatto Raha and Aneesh Nair to start MyHealthcare, a speciality healthtech startup. Founder & CEO, Shyatto’s experience in business strategy spans the sub-continent, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He has worked with the NDTV Group, Astro Networks, and others. Aneesh as co-founder and CIO is an information security practitioner with a rich healthcare tech background from his association with Worckhardt Healthcare.

Digitising and digitalising healthcare

Divya believes India is one of the most rapidly growing economies in the world in terms of digital ecosystem expansion, across retail, travel, fintech services, utility services, banking and more.

“However, the healthcare sector is lagging far behind in both digitisation and digitalisation. At MyHealthcare, we are focussed on using the power of a digital healthcare ecosystem to bridge the care delivery gaps using data driven care processes, and make healthcare more accessible across the country,” she explains.

They use the platform as a B2B solution, working with leading hospitals and clinics to build an ecosystem of care beyond physical infrastructures. The MyHealthcare ecosystem is deployed on a partnership model with hospitals, clinics, and healthcare institutions to build out and scale their digital health journey and most importantly improve their patient engagement.

MyHealthcare works with over 60 leading hospitals in India, managing 21 million patients across the ecosystem. It has partnered with leading service providers for diagnostics, e-pharmacy, healthcare at home, clinical device companies for remote patient monitoring and industry leaders for its technology backbone.

It began operations in December 2017, with two product and technology centres - in Gurugram and Bengaluru. MyHealthcare has now opened another technology centre in Dehradun. It also has sales centres across Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta, Manila and Hong Kong.

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360-degree solutions

“Our platform offers doctor consults (physical or virtual), diagnostics at home, home care services, pharmacy delivery, physiotherapy services (virtual), and remote patient monitoring. We are focussed on using digital channels such as mobile applications, web portals and chat services such as WhatsApp to make healthcare services seamlessly accessible to patients and empower them in managing their healthcare needs, wherever they may be located,” Divya says.

On the other hand, MyHealthcare has India’s leading hospitals, specialists, doctors and clinicians using its Electronic Medical Record (EMR) platform in managing healthcare needs of patients. The MyHealthcare EMR is designed to help doctors in getting a complete view of a patient’s clinical history, across the ecosystem, AI based tools in providing critical patient trends, care protocols and drug administration. A single screen view of the patient’s longitudinal health history and the availability of a clinically trained voice to text AI engine, allowing doctors to dictate their clinical instructions, contribute to delivering a faster and more accurate diagnosis.

“Expanding the same, we have now started rolling out our specialty EMRs. Our cardiology and paediatric speciality EMRs are available. Later this month, we will be live with our Endocrinology EMR, which will also launch our Diabetes Management Programme. Over the next few months, we aim to bring out specialty EMRs for Oncology, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Neurology, Dentistry and Ophthalmology,” she adds.

Growth and traction

Another feature of the platform is the The MyHealthcare@Home ecosystem deployed to manage home isolation care during COVID-19. It tracks a patient’s vitals at home, using device integrations with Omron (blood pressure & pulse monitoring), Kardia mobile (ECG & heart rate), Accu-Chek (for blood sugar) and the MyHealthcare mobile application for temperature, SPO2 and other parameters. The platform has built-in vital alerts, and an emergency care protocol, all of which is managed through a command centre at the hospital.

Divya counts TelaDoc, BookDoc, HaloDoc, Ro.Co and others as their competitors. The startup raised $4.5 million in Series A - July 2019, led by Sixth Sense Ventures with participation from Hunch Ventures and IDSMED (Hong Kong).

“Our revenues have tripled over the past three years, and we clocked 60 percent YoY growth this year. Most of this is driven by the increased patient and doctor adoption of the various services under the MyHealthcare ecosystem. The increase in repeat patient rate and expansion of services has given us a 5x growth in our unit earnings,” she says.

As a SaaS-based platform, MyHealthcare earns its revenue through every successful transaction.

As a B2B and B2B2C business, its target markets are India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East for now. It launched the MyHealthcare B2B2C platform last year, which is used by India’s healthcare providers such as Max Hospitals, PSRI Super Speciality, BLK Super Speciality, Aakash Healthcare, Primus Super Speciality, Vimhans-Nayati, Breach Candy Hospital, Nanavati Hospital, Woodlands Multispeciality, Neotia Healthcare group, Rainbow Hospitals group and more.

Its diagnostics partners include Healthians, Dr Lal Path Labs and Metropolis. Its e-pharmacy partners include PharmEasy and Tata 1mg.

“We are looking forward to expand our services and the network into Tier II and Tier III cities towns of India. One of my reasons to get into MyHealthcare is to work on our mission to make healthcare accessible for all. We will continue to learn from our patients and doctors on the digital tools we can build for them to make healthcare delivery more efficient and effective,” Divya says.