With its proprietary technology and packaging system, CAREDOSE claims to bring down healthcare cost. Gauri Angrish, Founder & CEO, CAREDOSE expounds on the her business model, innovative technology and her vision to provide cost-effective products
You have integrated IOT mechanisms to discover actual time medicine adherence. Can you elaborate on the same.
Medicine non-adherence is a silent epidemic that exists in more than 50 per cent of people on regular medication (World Health Organisation). What makes the problem worse is that more than 68 per cent of people do not communicate their non-adherence to their doctors or caregivers. This not only results in a worse disease progression but can also lead to wrong diagnosis. Additionally, since not adhering to one’s medication is a behavioural problem, we thought one way of ensuring 100 per cent adherence is by getting the patient’s caregiver and/ or doctor involved, by sending them alerts when the patient does not take his/her dose (negative adherence alerts), so that they can do something about it. Our smart dispenser uses IoT to remind patients about each dose and track their adherence, in real-time.
If patients do not take their doses on time, as prescribed by the doctor, then a “negative adherence alert” is automatically sent to the patient’s chosen caregiver, in real-time. Once they receive an alert they can then ensure that the patient takes his/ her dose.
The Smart dispenser tracks the patient’s adherence patterns and each time the patient goes for his/her doctors appointment, the adherence data is provided to the doctor. Now the doctor knows exactly how the patients have or have not taken their medication as prescribed and this helps the doctor with easier diagnosis and gives the doctor more confidence in altering future prescriptions.
What is your strategy for scale and sustainability in the future?
CAREDOSE uses proprietary technology and packaging to help ensure and track medicine adherence, whilst creating big data for healthcare entities & public health organisations. To achieve large sustainable scale, we follow a B2B2C (Business to business to consumer) model. This means that we partner with healthcare entities, equip them with our technology and products and help them manage, track and optimise their patients’ care. Since medicine non-adherence negatively impacts each and every stakeholder in the healthcare spectrum, we partner with all types entities including hospitals, pharmacies, public health organisations, pharmaceutical manufacturers, home health companies, corporate health management companies, etc. To top it off, our technologies and systems are completely modular and can easily integrate with existing systems, allowing for customisation and easy adoption.
Tell us about your funding activity?
After launching in 2016, we raised a friends and family round. That has now been followed by a seed round by GEMS Partners in January, 2018.
Tell us about the cost effectiveness of your product?
We have worked extremely hard on making our product cost effective. The complete service is available to consumers for between Rs 200 – 350 per month, depending on number of doses. This in turn not only helps them manage their medication and ensure adherence, but also helps them reduce their overall healthcare expenditure by avoiding disease progression and healthcare complications. Additionally, in most cases, the healthcare entities we partner with bear the cost of the consumer service as they get multiple additional benefits including retention, better management and access to data.
The model in a gist
Caredose operates via a B2B2C model as follows:
- For the patients
- Multi-dose dispenser – medicines are delivered to patients pre-organised and labeled by dose so they always take the right medicine at the right time
- Timely dose reminders – patients are sent a reminder for each dose so they never miss a dose
- Automated refills – refills are delivered on time, every time so they never run out of their medicines
- For the partners
- Automated multi-dose dispensing robot so they can package their patients medication as per prescription
- Customised dashboard so they can manage, track & optimise their patient care
- Customised data report so that they can make data driven decisions using our insights
- Co-branded dispensers so they can increase market value & brand presence amongst their patients
- Data mining happens at each point to enable tracking of drug from purchase to consumption
Tell us more about your tie-up with the government for the TB programme?
As discussed with you earlier, we would not like to give details about this. However, it would be great to mention that we are in talks to provide our service to TB patients via TB health facilities run by the RNTCP.
Tell us also about the robot that you have developed to make your processes and system stronger?
Our proprietary robot, DoseDroid, is an automated multi-dose dispensing robot. Once a prescription has been digitised into an E-prescription in our software, DoseDroid automatically cuts, sorts, pouches and labels patient’s medication exactly according to prescription. It has additional features like tracking a pill journey, which when combined with the data from the smart dispenser allows us to map the journey of a pill from purchase to consumption. Lastly, the medicines that are pouched are retained in the manufacturers’ packaging to ensure maximum efficacy of each pill. However, keeping a global footprint in mind, the DoseDroid can package both foiled and open pills.
What is your vision for the future of your company?
CAREDOSE has been developed keeping a global footprint in mind. We want to save lives by making CAREDOSE ubiquitous. Our main aim is to provide our proprietary adherence technology, products and services across the globe by partnering with various healthcare entities. Keeping this in mind we have made our systems completely modular and we provide open APIs for easy integration. We believe in the power of collaboration and feel it is the only way forward to be able to provide the transformation that the healthcare industry today, needs. We are focussing equally on private and public healthcare and provide various add-ons to our consumer services for easy adoption by patients from various geographies and socio-economic backgrounds.
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