AI and ABHA: How Eka Care digitised 110 million health records
Bolstered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Government's encouragement of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) platform, Eka Care states they have grown to digitise over 110 million health records with more than 50 million platform users. Vikalp Sahni , a technologist and a co-founder of the company, says 2021 was a favourable time to start a company as the Covid-19 pandemic meant health and wellbeing were at the forefront of everybody's mind. 'Also, during that time, CoWIN was a big platform that users were accessing for their vaccination, and the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) platform was also starting up. We as a company could build our platform that is ABDM native,' says Sahni.He adds that various aspects of the pandemic that led to a greater adoption of electronic records - COVID medical records, COVID vaccination certificates, and the creation of ABHA ID by doctors and patients.'While we could gather a lot of users thanks to CoWIN, ADBM, and these large-scale population-level initiatives, our electronic medical record (EMR) tool has gained a lot of attention because India was also looking for an electronic, modern medical record system to install and deploy in doctors' clinics. Our focus has always been on medical records. Others in the healthcare space, like Practo, rely on demand generation that takes care of the appointments of the doctors, and they do very well. If we look at 1MG, or PharmEasy, these are large companies that are more transaction-oriented around pharmacy and lab requirements.'While transactional use cases in healthcare, like appointments and online pharmacy, have largely been solved, Sahni emphasises that the clinical side, particularly longitudinal non-transactional data, poses a key challenge. Eka's software aims to address this by making it easier for doctors to document clinical information digitally, which is crucial for insights and interoperabilitySahni says there is a strong alignment with ABHA, and it is significant that the company has been able to create 17 million such accounts in a brief span of time. 'These are very early days for ABHA, but we are big believers in this story. It's practically similar to what UPI was in 2014-2015 when they launched. There are three kinds of people who have leveraged ABHA. These include alpha users – people who love to try something new. Second, the government has mandated ABHA as an entry point to take appointments in government hospitals. Here ABHA has features like booking an appointment by scanning a simple QR code, and many of these 17million users have actually used our app to take appointments from the government hospital.'Sahni highlighted that the company operates as a 'health AI platform,' developing purpose-driven AI models called 'parrotled' for medical document understanding, voice understanding, reasoning, and text understanding. These models are embedded in the app, allowing patients to gain meaningful health insights from various reports and enabling doctors to document consultations efficiently using their AI-powered 'scribe' platform without typing.'When you download the app, sync your Gmail account, or upload a record, we convert that entire record into meaningful health information so that you can see your trends from multiple reports that are coming in. And we just don't call ourselves a simple file storage solution. Today, doctors are using our Eka Scribe platform to actually document the consultation without typing any words,' says Sahni.Describing how it works, Sahni says the technology is like an ambient AI, listening to the doctor and patient conversation and then converting it into a medical document. The conversation can happen in English and a mix of English and regional languages like Hindi, which the AI understands and interprets. It can fill vital information, symptoms, medical history, and medication details into the EMR pad, and can also generate a PDF prescription.On the back of brisk adoption, Sahni says the financial goal as a four-year-old pure tech organization is to increase their paid doctor base from 12,000 to 35,000-40,000 by year-end. The company wants to expand the adoption of the developer APIs, currently used by over 160 developers and enterprises, with a pay-per-use model for services like Scribe. 'Today, we have over 160 developers or enterprises that use our developer APIs, and we want more and more developers and enterprises to start using us. These are pay-per-use APIs. So, let us say if you do a Scribe, we charge Rs X per minute for the data that you upload, and because we have an India-centric model, you would get a better output than giving your money to OpenAI or any other non-Indian LLMs,' says Sahni.The company, which is close to an ARR of over $3.5 million for the current year, aims to hit the $10 million ARR mark in the next 18-20 months.
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