GiveRED -Covid-19 plasma donation match

Rohini and Harshini are the co-founders of GiveRED. 

Rohini is passionate about building smart, scalable healthcare solutions. She has 8 years of experience in healthcare. She led strategy for NanoHealth, a health-tech HULT Prize winner, to help people in urban slums manage chronic conditions. She helped foster many partnerships between private innovations and public funding in India to scale health programs. She has a Masters in Policy and Development from London School of Economics.

Harshini is a second generation entrepreneur with over 7 years of experience in public health. She believes in using simple and well-designed technology solutions to make healthcare accessible and affordable. She has worked with the federal government in the US to build data driven quality improvement programs for physicians. Harshini is the South Asia Regional Chair for YNG (Young Presidents Organization - Next Generation). She majored in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Boston University, USA. 

In India, and most developing countries, the patient is responsible for procuring blood during their time of need. Availability and access of blood in blood banks in India is contingent on replacing the same amount of blood that a patient is using via a family member/donor, and for rare blood groups, it is dependent on the patient finding a suitable donor. Currently, this space is fragmented with no accountability of receiving quality blood in the required time frame. This has increased during Covid-19, where the need for emergency treatment using convalescent plasma is growing. 

GiveRED is a match-based service connecting patients to volunteer blood donors via a search engine. Our match uses location-specificity, blood group type and availability to enable donation in real-time. Given the current pandemic, we are extending our service to connect recovered, eligible COVID-19 patients to donate plasma to patients in need. 

India faces an annual shortage of nearly 24% of blood. According to the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) 2018, the total estimated demand for blood is 14.6 million units, of which only 11.1 million units of blood was collected. In addition, in the last 5 years, 2.6 million units of blood were wasted due to expiry. Access and availability of blood are the two main factors GiveRED seeks to solve for through becoming a ubiquitous donation platform for donors. 

The blood procurement problem is critically exacerbated due to COVID-19; where there has been a 75% drop in blood donations (according to the Government of India, 2020 report), and the search for recovered COVID-19 plasma donors is currently chaotic. India has become the third largest country in terms of number of COVID-19 cases, and is seeing one of the fastest growth rates with numbers doubling every 16 days. Expanding GiveRED to cater to emergency plasma donors will establish an efficient, streamlined platform to register and connect plasma donors with those in need. 

Matching Service: We have built a search engine that matches requests for blood to volunteer donors using an area/postal code, blood group type and current active status of the donor. This automates the search, and reaches out to a large number of eligible donors in a very short period of time. We currently interface with patients and donors via WhatsApp business, since it is a ubiquitous platform with over 450 million active users in India. We intend to use the data to build demand forecasting models to make on-demand blood availability more predictable, and increase the rate of matching. 

GiveRED Community: We actively build and manage our donor community through corporate and university tie-ups, as well as social media marketing. We enable a transparent, logistically convenient platform for donors to donate blood to enhance the current donation experience that is fraught with waiting/ incorrect information and burdensome coordination. RED is of no cost and no risk to the donor with a high convenience factor.  GiveRED is the only company making blood donation cool. It is donor-centric, uses gamification and social gratification to build a motivated, lifelong donor community.

GiveRED serves people across all segments and classes that are in need of blood. However, some of our primary target groups consist of:

1. Individuals who reside in rural and/or medically underserved areas that come to urban cities for treatment: These people come from low income backgrounds and come to seek treatment using government sponsored health schemes. We use Whatsapp as a front-end user interface, as opposed to any other app that makes it hard for them to access. Whatsapp has 450 million active users in India. We connect with small,medium and large scale hospitals to identify and funnel in patients from rural areas. 

2. Thalassemia/ Patients with Blood Disorders: We reach out and create a database through blood banks, Thalassemia societies, cancer societies to create a list of patients that need transfusion regularly and we tee up donors for them in advance. 

3. Pregnant and medically at-risk women: We are working with OBGYNs that consult for smaller nursing homes, and struggle to get a consistent supply of blood for planned and emergency deliveries. Many of these centers refer their patients to larger hospitals resulting in the patient incurring higher treatment costs which they typically cannot afford to pay.

Dimension: Elevating issues and their projects by building awareness and driving action to solve the most difficult problems of our world

GiveRED Donor Community: We are actively building an engaged and motivated donor community (so far 5000 donors). Donor-centric approach to increase logistical convenience, transparency, and gratification levels of donors. 

GiveRED Patients: Access to a large network of donors to increase chances of matching (over 300 matches). All coordination is streamlined to protect patient and donor privacy; and to discourage unsolicited ask for cash/ favours for donations. 

Ubiquitous and scalable solution pan India and other countries. 

The idea emerged during a health emergency for one of the co-founders’ family members, and the search for volunteer donors revealed the archaic and inefficient system there is to procure blood in times of need. Rohini and her brother started understanding the market to understand the various players and services provided for about 3 months, before joining hands with Harshini to start GiveRED in November 2019. 

We then brought on Shishir Biyyala, the lead engineer at Invitae in San Francisco, to volunteer his time and architect the tech solution. Pooja Errabelli, a human design expert joined the team as the Creative Director to lead the branding, social media, and campaign efforts. 

Two years ago, my (Rohini) uncle had to under-go an open heart surgery for which he was asked to get 4 pints of blood. We tried multiple blood banks, reached out to NGOs, posted on social media groups for donors but with no luck. The surgery was postponed by 23 days because we didn’t find blood on time. This experience was truly anguishing. We realised that it is not uncommon for half of the world’s population living in developing countries and we intend to solve that!

Rohini has worked in the health space for 8 years. She worked in partnership with the state government and private dialysis providers to design and implement a public private partnership for making dialysis services affordable to the poor with a direct impact on at least two million people. She developed and implemented the gamification strategy for NanoHealth (HULT prize winner health-tech startup) to incentivise chronic care management to reduce healthcare costs now scaled across to states in India.   

Harshini studied Molecular Biology and Genetics; and worked with a healthcare consulting firm in New York where she built data driven quality improvement programs for physicians. In India, she started a housing care center for pediatric cancer patients from rural areas that focuses on empowering the caregivers on nutrition, safety, counseling and treatment options. She helped scale the network to 20,000 caregivers with a lot of them now becoming professional nurses.

We have combined healthtech experience of 15 years

The blood procurement market in India is extremely opaque, and has attracted minimal innovation. Over the course of many decades, the market developed vested interests, inefficiencies, and artificial supply-demand constraints to make money. Blood drives are conducted without any accountability to whether the blood is sold in grey markets, or used appropriately. Aside from that, the market favours only a few established brand names to collect blood, and often the supply to smaller/ regional blood banks runs dry- causing a supply demand mismatch. Bringing a radically transparent technology platform that gives a clear view of donations and where they will be used, has put many established players off. 

We have been able to persist, reach out to the people directly via social media, engage students and employees via campus drives to educate, and encourage donations transparently and based on the need to reduce wastage or potential mis-use. This is a very sensitive industry, and takes a lot of grit to work transparently. 

India’s healthcare is heterogeneous, with private hospitals providing good quality care at high out-of-pocket costs, while the public sector is struggling to meet basic healthcare needs for the majority. Rohini along with two partners started an eye care facility that would provide excellent outpatient and surgical care in tier two cities using a cross-subsidisation model. Patients pay for the surgeries, which are used to cross subsidise care in the same hospital for under-privileged population. The facility saw over 70,000 out patients, and performed over 5000+ surgeries, of which 41% are subsidised, establishing a new standard of low cost, high quality care that is financially viable.

In India, families travel from rural areas to urban cities for their child's cancer treatment. Most of these families do not have the financial resources and/or education to effectively fight the disease. Harshini started a pediatric child care centre in Hyderabad, India to address this challenge.  The centre is a home away from home for underprivileged families and provides free accommodation & holistic support to children travelling with their parents for treatment from small towns to cities. To date, with my team, I have helped scale the network to include 20,000 caregivers across India.

We are modernising the blood procurement market to make it easy, transparent and efficient for the patients and volunteer blood donors.  

The three ways in which GiveRED is new are:

RED is a one stop shop for patients to get blood. 

RED is donor-centric, uses gamification and social gratification to build a motivated, lifelong donor community. 

RED is a digitally powered solution that will build demand forecasting models and use AI to make search more intelligent. 

In the absence of RED, patients physically approach blood banks to buy blood and/or need to look for blood donors via informal channels such as social media, friends and family networks. There are online databases that provide donor information but the outreach and coordination process is dependent on the patient. 

In the absence of RED, donors typically donate via blood drives with no insight into whether the blood has been accepted, rejected, or used. At times, donors respond to ad-hoc requests which are often unverified and not logistically convenient for the donor, making donation a challenging experience. 

Current People

Volunteers: 5000

Patients served: 300

One Year

Volunteers: 50,000

Patients served: 10,000

5 Years

Volunteers: 200,000

Patients Served: 30,000+

One Year:

1. Expand the GiveRED community and service pan- India and have over 50,000 volunteer donors and expand to serving 10,000 people. 

2. Strategic Partners: Exploring partnership with GVK EMRI 108 ambulance service, India's largest ambulance service to be their platform to serve emergency blood donations. 

3. Smart Blood Solution: Package and create a technologically robust smart blood solution that can be licensed to other providers. 

Five Years:

1. Public Private Partnership: Become the technology and service provider in partnership with State Government departments to operate the service via public funding. 

2. License to large scale NGOs in the blood bank space to manage their blood collection. 

3. Expand to other low and middle income countries, particularly Africa where the shortage of blood is severe and the awareness on regular blood donation is limited. 

Financial barriers: 

Blood donation and procurement is purely voluntary in nature. Government regulations and framework in India and most countries doesn't allow for sustainable business models to thrive. The financial support required to create large scale awareness and impact is significant. 

My co-founder and I are bootstrapping the organisation currently. But would require grant funding in order to scale to a place where we are able to create sustainable financing partnerships with Corporates or Government. 

We are looking for grants to help us sustain this period. We are also leveraging our contacts with influencers (actors, sportsmen) who are willing to talk about GiveRED on social media to get to our scale faster. 

We are non-profit. However, we aim to become operationally sustainable through partnerships with governments. One of the most promising models in India and other developing countries is where public funding supports the provision of the service free of cost to the citizens. This is especially so for essential services, and GiveRED's mandate to help patients look for donors in an efficient manner fits the bill. 

We are also looking to license the technology (search engine/ AI used demand prediction to streamline supply) to large scale NGOs at a later stage. 

Public Private Partnerships: Government funds the monthly operational costs based on the Memorandum of Understanding to provide the service free of cost in particular geographies. 

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Partnerships: Strategic partnerships with national and international corporations like Infosys, Microsoft and many more to provide the platform for their employees to search for/ donate blood. The companies would fund GiveRED via their CSR funding.

Licensing Technology to large NGOs: GiveRED licenses the Donor Community Management and Search engine platform to other NGOs to use in their respective countries to raise awareness, ease donation process and improve donor gratification. 

None so far.