
Future of health tech – The diagnostics revolution in India - medd-in
Every year 100 million people are pushed into poverty and another 150 million severely affected in the world due to catastrophic costs associated with illness, mostly from developing countries in Asia and Africa. Even in a developed country like US, 12 million people are misdiagnosed every year, i.e., on an average a person is misdiagnosed thrice in a lifetime.<p>Many start-ups and even bigger companies are now trying to solve parts of these problems, and make healthcare delivery more efficient. IBM with its Watson is using supercomputers to make clinical decision support systems, Theranos is using microfluidics to provide cheaper blood tests, we, at Medd are approaching the problem from a different point of view. We are trying to use the available resources and make the system more efficient to deliver more consistent health out comes at more affordable prices.<p>The problem we identified was that doctors in most self-pay healthcare markets take a commission or kickback from diagnostic centers to refer patients to them, artificially increasing the prices by up to 100%.<p>We believed that since many people were aware of this malpractice they would be willing to go to a different lab which provided a high quality service to them at better prices. Our premise was simple, but considered impossible to implement by most in the industry – doctors, diagnostic centers, hospitals, investors.<p>So, we tied with the best labs in the city with NABL (ISO 15189) accreditation and in four years, along with college we were able to grow it from 1 center with almost no patients to 15 centers and over 100,000 patients a year. With the model being successful, we presented it at the prestigious 14th World Congress on Public Health, demonstrating an 80% reduction in cost for a patient using our services.
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kejohnson
So basically, you opened diagnostic labs to compete with other labs in the
area that were inflating their prices. Your lab offers services at reasonable
rates, which undercuts the unfairly priced labs who are gouging consumers. Is
this correct?

