The Health Lync

Our vision is to revolutionize health care by combining electronic health records and frugal diagnostic innovation with a telemedicine platform. By combining these vital technological pillars we are making primary healthcare accessible, affordable, and accurate. The Health Lync’s platform serves as a shared economy market for doctors/clinics to improve the accessibility of primary healthcare, especially for the middle and low-income countries. Telemedicine to a mere video call has reached the limits of its utility, therefore we augmented teleconsultation with remote diagnostic capabilities with our patent-pending invention SuperCAPE©. SuperCAPE© is a passive cape for mobile phones that converts ordinary phones to a diagnostic device with Auscultation, otoscopy, pulse oximeter and blood pressure monitor. The technology involved ensures accurate diagnosis and is very economical. SuperCAPE© comes with different mechanical attachments for different diagnosis. Furthermore, our telemedicine platform is integrated with a cloud-based open-source EMR contributing to the digitalization of health records.

The Health Lync is making primary healthcare an essential commodity for the communities around the world who have been devoid of it. According to WHO, scaling up primary healthcare interventions across low and middle-income countries could save 60 million lives and increase average life expectancy by 3.7 years by 2030. This statistic sheds light on the scale of the problem our company addresses. At the Health Lync, we believe access to affordable and accurate primary healthcare is a fundamental human need and no one should be bereft of it. Adding 3.7 years to everyone’s lives and save 60 millions of them from a premature exit, is a goal worth spending our careers on!  

The Health Lync is arguably the only telemedicine platform with synchronous diagnostic capabilities and integrated EMR. We plan to make it universally accessible in developing parts of the world. The platform offers two-way audio-video medical consultation to connect doctors to people of such regions. The platform is equipped with remote diagnostic capabilities with the help of SuperCAPE©, a passive mechanical medical hardware that couples with a smartphone. The platform is also integrated with Electronic Medical Record(EMR) that enables the digitisation of their health records that otherwise aren't being recorded. Doctors from anywhere around the world can register for free and offer their medical assistance to geographical regions they are licensed to do so. The SuperCAPE© utilizes the omnipresent mobile hardware and digital signal processing done via our mobile app to record the sound of essential vitals. We are working on enhancing the diagnostic capabilities of SuperCAPE© to bring forth the scope of otoscopy, blood pressure monitoring, and pulse oximetry. The EMR integration is done with open source medical practice management software "OpenEMR" which enables the platform to store medical health records. Also, the health records can be easily integrated with Amazon HealthLake to provide AI/ML assisted diagnosis

The Health Lync aims to serve people of developing nations in low and middle-income countries which have poor healthcare infrastructure and a low doctor-to-population ratio. We are planning to set a foothold in India, being my birthplace I witnessed the dire situations of villages where family members need to carry the patient to a nearby city for medical attention. According to WHO, there is only 1 doctor for 1476 people against the recommended 1:1000 and this statistic is even worse for countries in Africa. Furthermore, people of these regions seek medical attention only when the patient situation becomes critical whereas such a situation can be avoided with primary healthcare intervention in these regions. Therefore, we plan to offer people a platform where they can connect with doctors for primary medical assistance and an affordable set of diagnostic tools required to do so. Alternatives to our solution are too expensive for poor countries or non-existent even in the developed world. Apart from solving the accessibility and affordability problem, our products also prove helpful for patients with chronic diseases and OPD patients saving them from tedious routine check-ups and necessary ER visits. Therefore, we are providing a better and affordable alternative for high and middle-class citizens too. 

COVID-19 crippled healthcare infrastructure of many developed countries because no country was prepared for such unprecedented event. The situation in developing countries is much worse. The recent surge in India bears evidence of the situation where even the metropolitan areas were badly affected. The rural regions were living in oblivion due to lack of awareness and they are once more prone to such catastrophe. Hence, Health Lync aims to equip these regions with a telemedicine platform for medical assistance and SuperCAPE for the necessary diagnosis required to detect an outbreak. Therefore, with our help, such a situation could be mitigated.

The Health Lync is an incorporated company based out of Chicago you can visit our website for reference. We have successfully built the platform, with around 100 users. Soon our mobile application would be available on Google PlayStore for public beta. Design for the SuperCAPE is complete with more than 25 prototypes manufactured.  However, we still need FDA clearance for large-scale manufacturing. We have a patent filed for the SuperCAPE and intellectual property ownership for the Health Lync platform.

The idea of a telemedicine platform with synchronous diagnosis tools is not new to the telemedicine industry. However, there is no other telemedicine platform that resonates the real-life medical practice like ours. Our shared economy model gives doctors the liberty to build their virtual clientele. As we know doctors’ practice thrives on trust, hence we decided to sign up established clinics and doctors on our platform. In addition, new practitioners who face challenges arising from large startup capital requirement can also register to help them to get a head start without much investment in a clinic. The diagnostic aspect of our solution is frugally engineered to make it affordable for everyone. We are providing services that solve the problems for both the doctors and the mass, thus we believe it will revolutionize the telemedicine industry.

We currently have around 100 practitioners registered on our platform, out of which 14 are private beta users acquired via conferences organised by our company. By the second quarter of 2021, we are looking forward to doubling this figure following that we will begin our advertisement campaign to gain users. One advantage of setting a foothold in India is that our company would be the harbinger of synchronous diagnosis in a telemedicine platform. This would help us in getting traction speedily, with these presumptions our back of the hand calculation forecasted CAGR of 15% within 2 financial years. In five years, we foresee our company to be the quintessential telemedicine platform for India and achieve the goal of making primary healthcare accessible to every region of the country with internet penetration. 

The following are the criteria that we would use to measure our progress towards our impact goals:

• Number of people registered on our platform from low-income regions
• Number of SuperCAPE delivered to these regions
• Number of teleconsultations done in these regions

The UN SDG indicator 3.8.1 aligns with our solution (i.e. coverage of essential health services) could also be used to measure our progress.

Shubhankar, Pushkar, Shivam, Renu, Chanakya, Saket, Sachin, Piyush, Prachi, Deepthi, Avin Joshi 

Full-time staff: 5, part-time interns 3, contractor 2 

Board member: Avin Joshi, ex. COO e-transmedia (Electronic health records company) 

Sachin’s bio: CEO and founder of The Health Lync with over 20 years of experiences in healthcare, manufacturing and security markets. Sachin is successfully running Fieldviewers LLC. for the past 7 years.

Prachi’s bio: Co-founder of the Health Lync. She has over 20 years of experience in healthcare and consumer businesses. Within Pharmaceutical sciences and MBA she’s a great team member to oversee operations and program management. 

Avin Joshi: Avin Joshi is on the board of directors and has had a successful startup exit in the electronic health record. He serves in the capacity of an advisor and strategic thinker. 

Pushkar’s bio: Final year Undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur(Sundar Pichai Alma matter) with Industrial & System engineering major. Pushkar is the architect of Health Lync’s IT infrastructure and has been working on this project since the start. 

Shivam’s bio: Final year Undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur(Sundar Pichai Alma matter) doing a major in Economics. Shivam is our Marketing strategist and operations and product manager.

Deepthi: Deepthi Variketi has software development experience of more than 10 years. Her expertise will be crucial in phase II of migrating to native based development. She is also helping with implementing a single sign-on between EMRs and the telehealth platform. 

Design team: Saket, Renu and Chanakya are responsible for UI/UX design and marketing campaigns including social media posts. The design team operates pretty much independently, as needed by creative minds. 

Shubhankar: Dr Subhankar serves in the capacity of a medical advisor and interfaces with our doctors.

Our team is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. We have a diverse team with members from the US and India. We value diversity and as depicted between our team we speak Marathi, Telugu, Gujrati, Hindi, Bihari, Marwari, Tamil and English. Having linguistic diversity along with geographical diversity is a great asset and important for a team’s success. 

With the help of MIT Solve's resources and mentorship, we will be able to develop our product and expand our reach among the target impact audience. If selected our company could utilise the $10,000 to get the certifications and licenses required to enter the market. 

It would be ideal for us to have a partner who advises us in legal and regulatory matters so we experience no hindrance in our goal. Apart from this, having a partner in the domain of public relations and product distribution could also prove very beneficial for us to gain popularity among the masses and establishing a global supply chain for the distribution of our solution.

We would to partner up with government healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid and programs of different governments to assist them in bringing healthcare inclusivity.

The Health Lync aims to bring healthcare inclusivity within every social stratum with its telemedicine platform and synchronous diagnostic capabilities. Citizen of the US who don't have access to proper healthcare can use our platform to seek consultations with doctors. We could utilize the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to develop our product in terms of expanding its diagnostic capabilities and improving IT infrastructure.

The Health Lync's remote diagnostic innovation SuperCAPE could be used by healthcare workers for the remote check-up of patients suffering from the COVID-19 virus. In many developing countries, many healthcare workers have lost their lives due to exposure to the virus and this fear has also caused deterrence to check-up patients in COVID wards/centres. Our solution equips these doctors with the ability to treat these patients without worrying about the risk of exposure.  We could utilize the Global Fund Prize grant to develop our product in terms of expanding its diagnostic capabilities and improving IT infrastructure, and also receive FDA clearance.