How preventive healthcare start-ups are revolutionising the sector

“Prevention is better than cure.” In the 16th century, Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus coined the immortal phrase that today manifests the business model of a spurt of start-ups focussed on preventive healthcare. The core message: stay fit, eat healthy, live healthy, and show diseases the door, especially non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases (heart attack, stroke), chronic respiratory diseases (lung cancer, cystic fibrosis), diabetes, etc. If you have a consistently unhealthy diet, don’t exercise, or you smoke or drink, you are at greater risk of attracting these diseases, big killers all.

What should you do? Well, you would know that answer. But what you may not know is: the right food to eat, right exercise for you, right lifestyle habits. A burgeoning segment of the population wants to know these facts, and act on them, forming a community of sorts that has become a big market for business. And start-ups such as Cult.fit, HealthifyMe, Fitterfly, Pristyn Care and Mfine, among many others, are jumping in with an array of experts from fitness maestros to dieticians and gadgets such as fitness trackers and health-monitoring devices to help you do what is right for you. Backed by big money from venture capitalists and snazzy tech-led platforms, these start-ups offer a multitude of solutions that are pumped up through cool marketing campaigns.

Experts believe that such preventive healthcare start-ups have the potential to mitigate India’s burden of NCDs with their innovations and technology-led solutions. “Preventive healthtech start-ups can certainly play a role in mitigating the disease burden in the country,” says Dr Anoop Misra, Chairman of Fortis-C-DOC hospital in Delhi. “Patients are also more aware about their health and are using several app-based services to monitor their basic health parameters.”

You get an idea of just how big the ‘burden’ is when you see the stats: NCDs’ contribution to all deaths in India shot up to 61.8 per cent in 2016 from 37.9 per cent in 1990, according to a study by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). That has increased to 70 per cent in 2022, as per independent data platform Statista.

“The burden of chronic diseases has been rising steadily in the country and patients are also more aware that untreated diabetes, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (an inflammatory lung disease), etc. can be very risky,” says Dr Hema Venkataraman, Medical Advisor-New Offerings at Practo, an online doctor consultation app. “The curative healthcare market is going to struggle to keep up with the rise of chronic diseases. So, turning to preventive healthcare is inevitable and the need of the hour.”

Ironically, it was a communicable disease—Covid-19—that set this trend afire. The two years and more of the pandemic taught all of us the need to look after ourselves through healthy lifestyles and food habits. “Covid-19 presented an unprecedented fillip to the healthcare revolution with people realising the priceless nature of good health and well-being,” says Jitin Bhasin, Founder and CEO of SaveIN, a fintech platform for healthcare providers. “At the same time, India is home to over 900 million mobile devices, the cheapest internet in the world, and class-leading data pools, generating a powerful technology-led revolution in preventive healthcare.” As Bhasin further points out, enhanced awareness, rising education levels, higher incomes and technology exposure are making Indians willing to spend more on preventive healthcare.

These factors are shifting the nature of cure in India from curative (treatment after falling ill) to preventive (pre-empting illnesses) through early diagnostics, consultations, fitness solutions, fitness gadgets and much else.

According to a joint report by RedSeer Strategy Consultants, Chiratae Ventures and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Indian preventive healthcare market is expected to double in size from $93 billion in 2021 to $197 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 22 per cent. Comparatively, the curative healthcare segment, which constituted 64 per cent of the total healthcare spends in India in 2021-22, is growing at 15 per cent.

Such numbers underline the scope of the preventive healthcare market in India in the coming years. Not surprisingly, several start-ups have emerged to cater to this segment—offering solutions from lifestyle monitoring through technology, to disease management to wellness and nutrition. “Over 65 per cent of India is under 35 years of age, offering a total addressable market of one billion people, and this segment is best suited for preventive healthcare products and services,” says Bhasin of SaveIN.

Manan Chandan, Senior Director-New Initiatives at HealthifyMe, says there has been growing demand for the company’s preventive medical plans amongst Indians who have developed lifestyle conditions after the outbreak of Covid-19. “[The demand] has been accelerated by the pandemic as people have understood the elevated risks of having conditions like obesity, diabetes, etc. Governments across the world are also creating pathways for early interventions because chronic disease burden has a significant economic impact,” says Chandan.

The rapid pace of adoption of wearable devices such as fitness trackers and smartwatches is also contributing to this trend. Fitness technology start-ups such as GOQii are driving growth in preventive healthcare by unlocking the power of consumers’ health and lifestyle data. Next step: a health Metaverse, which is likely to transform digital health into an immersive space, says Vishal Gondal, Founder & CEO of GOQii: “Health Metaverse will empower players in the virtual as well as the physical world. This will be done by providing tokens or rewards for adopting a healthy lifestyle.”

Apart from gadgets, powering the shift towards preventive healthcare are technologies such as cloud computing. The start-ups are leveraging cloud computing to build and scale their applications, which generate, digitise and analyse vast amounts of health data using advanced technologies such as internet of things (IoT), data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The RedSeer report says that over 30 per cent of the top 40 funded preventive healthtech start-ups leverage AI/ML for use cases such as medical image analysis, document extraction, chatbots, personalisation, and health risk prediction.

For example, HealthifyMe’s latest offering, HealthifyPro, predicts glucose values without using a physical device. Instead, it leverages Amazon SageMaker, a cloud ML platform, which helps build, train and deploy ML models for any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows. HealthifyPro also uses other AWS services such as Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon Elastic Container Service and Amazon RDS to deliver superior health outcomes.

“We work closely with many founders to provide healthtech start-ups the technology foundation they need to bring their vision to life,” says Kumara Raghavan, Head–AWS Startups India at Amazon Internet Services. “Healthtech start-ups are tapping into the preventive health opportunity across segments such as nutrition management, condition management, lifestyle monitoring, health check-ups, as well as mental and physical wellness.”

Digital technology is also helping diagnostics start-ups attract customers for early, preventive health check-ups. “Early detection and screening technologies make up a sizeable portion of preventive healthcare,” says Dheeraj Jain, Founder of Redcliffe Labs, an omnichannel diagnostics chain. “Due to the precision and accessibility of cutting-edge diagnostic procedures, this market segment has attracted the greatest share. On this front, the preventive healthcare market is a lucrative option for expansion.”

Not surprisingly, venture capital is rushing in to fund preventive healthtech start-ups. For instance, Chiratae Ventures, a tech VC firm, has invested over $110 million across 18 start-ups, including Cult.fit, HealthifyMe, Redcliffe Labs, Smiles.ai and several others. Overall, funding in healthtech start-ups has risen a whopping 432 per cent to $2.9 billion in 2021 from $543.4 million in 2020, as per data from Tracxn. Such start-ups have raised $1.3 billion so far in 2022. “The growing concern over the next Covid wave, which has already begun spreading globally, will increase the user base of such start-ups in the coming months,” says Neha Singh, Co-founder of Tracxn.

That is probably a good thing. As the start-ups increase their reach, and the scale of their preventive outcomes rises over time, they might actually help reduce the burden of chronic diseases in the country.

@neetu_csharma