AmarDoctor

With a population of 170 million, Bangladesh faces severe primary care accessibility issues due to a shortage of medical professionals—there is only one doctor for every 10,000 residents in rural and suburban areas. This issue is compounded by social, religious, and cultural barriers, leading to significant inequalities in healthcare access among urban and rural populations, between males and females, and across high and low socioeconomic groups. Due to these access inequalities, unaddressed health issues often escalate into emergencies, pushing 6 million people into poverty annually due to out-of-pocket (OOP) emergency medical expenses.

Telemedicine and digital health apps have proven successful in many parts of the world in improving accessibility. However, they have not been widely adopted in Bangladesh due to two main factors : 

• Low patient literacy presents a significant obstacle to the widespread adoption of digital health solutions. In our survey, we found that more than half (52%) had difficulty using text-based interfaces because of the complexities of typing on Bengali digital keyboards.

• Many doctors hesitate to use telemedicine because collecting a patient's symptoms during a virtual consultation often takes more time. Bangladesh has the shortest primary care consultation duration in the world, averaging 48 seconds. AI-guided remote triaging and clinical decision support tools have proven effective in the developed world because of their ability to reduce virtual consultation time. However, these systems are trained on European patient data and are inherently biased towards European patients' languages and diseases. Consequently, these systems are unable to adequately support patients and doctors in Bangladesh.

Amid the growing excitement over AI, healthcare stakeholders and decision-makers in Bangladesh, like many other countries, are swiftly adopting digital healthcare solutions. However, the rush to implement these non-inclusive technologies without addressing their inherent biases and limitations could exacerbate the already significant inequalities in healthcare access.

We've created AmarDoctor, an innovative AI-powered digital health application that enables Bengali and English speakers to access vital primary care services and manage their health data within a single app. Its AI-powered, voice-interactive health assistant can triage patients in their chosen language (currently Bengali or English), gathering their symptoms and medical history to connect them with the appropriate doctor. AmarDoctor facilitates essential primary care services, like symptom reporting and appointment scheduling, through text and voice communication on both mobile and web platforms, greatly simplifying access for those with limited technical skills. 

Furthermore, for doctors, we offer AI-generated, comprehensive recommendations for clinical decision support to streamline the consultation process. Through an interactive dashboard, doctors have access to patients' appointment requests, past medical conditions, and current symptoms, complemented by precise AI-generated recommendations. These include provisional diagnoses and personalized treatment plans that consider a range of risk factors, thereby optimizing decision-making in video consultations and markedly decreasing consultation times. Post-consultation, we enhance the prescription with customized digital health education in the patient’s chosen language, empowering them to better manage their health independently.

Our AI health assistant, leveraging analytical insights from 1.4 million patient data points, enables voice-interactive medical questionnaires for accurately collecting patient’s vitals, symptoms, and medical history. To serve a diverse patient population, we crafted a bespoke medical automated speech recognition system (ASR), trained on 300 hours of audio covering 1264 medical terms (symptoms, severity) across 460 common diseases in two major Bengali dialects. 


Amar Doctor Key Product Feature Demo : Youtube Link 

Amar Doctor Website : https://www.amardoctor.health/

Bangladesh has one of the weakest primary healthcare systems globally. Our solution seeks to transform healthcare accessibility for 130 million individuals ( 110 million rural, 20 million semi-urban and urban) within Bangladesh's underserved communities, by enabling swift and effective virtual primary care consultations through data-driven connectivity.

Patient’s challenges Bangladesh's four million RMG workers, mostly female, contribute significantly to the GDP but face severe healthcare neglect. In many factories, adequate healthcare is merely a compliance formality, with actual access hindered by heavy workloads and fear of management reprimand. We started with 500,000 female RMG factory workers and their families in Savar, home to approximately 1,000 RMG factories. Out-of-pocket emergency healthcare expenditure is a major contributor to poverty and it can be significantly reduced through affordable primary care and patient education. For these communities, the primary need is regular access to primary care at an affordable cost. Due to poor digital literacy this population is unable to take advantage of digital health initiatives. 

Challenge to connect doctors with these deprived communities Through extensive secondary research and interviews, we've discovered that young doctors are more open to embracing new technologies and are willing to provide affordable consultations on virtual platforms, provided these platforms can accurately collect relevant information about a patient’s medical condition and history, and reduce consultation time. Current systems are unable to provide these efficiencies.

Our strategy

To connect this healthcare deprived population with doctors in a data-driven way, we are launching the AmarDoctor platform (Android & iOS app and web apps) across the country on June 1st, providing access to its benefits for both groups. With its user-friendly interface and advanced AI tools, it efficiently captures detailed patient data. This enables us to connect forward-thinking doctors and patients nationwide, offering affordable primary care. This data-driven approach will empower patients to take greater control of their health, build trust in the transparency of digital health systems, and provide affordable healthcare solutions. Ultimately, this initiative is expected to increase digital healthcare adoption among these underserved communities and improve health-seeking behavior.

Why RMG factory worker communities ?

RMG factory workers represent an ideal starting point for rolling out innovative digital health solutions, as they mirror a significant portion of the Bangladeshi population with limited digital literacy. Our earlier attempt to educate workers through partnerships with two RMG factories encountered significant hurdles, including conflicts of interest with factory middle management and inflexible factory schedules. These workers live in tight-knit communities within densely populated areas close to their jobs. This socio-economic structure fosters a strong ability to embrace new technologies by learning from each other. Leveraging this, we shifted our strategy and, funded by the Roddenberry foundation, launched a pilot with 10 female smart health champions and one doctor. Using the AmarDoctor app, they've successfully conducted virtual consultations for approximately 700 community members in just two months. Their collective experience provides valuable insights into broadening our reach to similarly situated communities across the country.

Our team consists of AI scientists, public health professionals, general practitioners, and field implementation specialists, all of whom have extensive experience working with underprivileged communities in Bangladesh. Both co-founders are ethnic Bengali speakers native to Bangladesh, bringing together 30 years of expertise in AI-driven healthcare product development. Our technical, clinical, and operational members also come from diverse socio-economic backgrounds within Bangladesh, enriching their understanding of the patient population. Additionally, our operational team has significant experience in deploying novel, technology-driven health interventions, effectively bridging communication gaps with our target population.

With support from the Roddenberry Catalyst Fund and the Santander Small Innovation Grant, we're running two pilot programs of AmarDoctor in Bangladesh. The first targets female RMG industry workers in semi-urban locales, turning them into SMART health champions to disseminate the AmarDoctor app and facilitate affordable virtual consultation to their community members. The second aims to utilize local drugstore owners, often the initial healthcare contact for almost 100 million rural inhabitants, by equipping them with the app’s clinical decision support and virtual consultation features. This will enable them to deliver prompt virtual primary care services through AmarDoctor to 100,000 individuals in Rangabali, an island in southern Bangladesh affected by climate change. Our technical team works closely with these early adopter communities, integrating their feedback to ensure our solutions are well-suited for a broad demographic. Our learnings from these pilots and previous user research surveys uniquely position us to expand our initiative to the broader RMG community and eventually nationwide.

The MedAi team has formed a strategic partnership with the Bangladesh Society of General Physicians (BSGP) to roll out their virtual Daktarkhana (Doctor Chamber) across 161 centers nationwide. This effort aims to rapidly extend services to rural patients and increase doctor participation. This collaboration uses the AmarDoctor app to deliver affordable primary care to 3 million people across Bangladesh. Additionally, we work closely with esteemed public health experts from leading academic institutions in the UK (Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham, UK ) and Bangladesh (Ibrahim Medical College, Dhaka) to continuously monitor and evaluate our strategies. 

Amar Doctor mobile and web application is currenty available to a selected group of users who are participating in our pilots in Bangladesh. To date, we are conducting two pilots in Bangladesh to assess user experience and behavior before a nationwide launch. 

Pilot 1 in Rangabali, Patuakhali

This pilot aimed to utilize local drugstore owners to deliver virtual primary care services to 100,000 inhabitants of Rangabali, an island in southern Bangladesh affected by climate changes. However, we encountered challenges with drugstore owners who were reluctant to participate due to conflicts of interest related to medication prescriptions, leading us to pause this pilot.

Campaign : Provide fast virtual care to fishermen communities.

Campaign : Empower local drug store owners. 

Link : https://youtu.be/ERa0Wrg5Nt8

Pilot 2 - SMART Health Champion Program

Supported by the Roddenberry Foundation, this pilot involved training female smart health champions to facilitate virtual medical consultations using the AmarDoctor app within their communities. To date, we have trained five champions who have successfully conducted over 700 virtual consultations.

Link : https://medaihealth.com/activities/activities-post8-MedAI.html

These pilot projects have provided critical insights into user experience, patient behavior, and the various challenges faced by users. The feedback and data gathered are instrumental in refining our app and services in preparation for our nationwide launch in June 2024.

Our suite of AI solutions, including Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), voice-interactive triaging, and a provisional diagnosis recommendation system, is fully deployed on the cloud and ready for integration with third-party applications. We are currently collaborating with PreMedGo, a UK-based digital health company, to integrate our solutions into their app.

Funded by Novartis Bangladesh, a customized version of our solution is already being utilized by the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD) in Bangladesh to manage critical heart failure patients.

Link : https://heartfailureclinic.org/

We are seeking to gain visibility among prominent medical societies (e.g., Bangladesh Diabetic Society), major health NGOs (e.g., BRAC), land public health experts in Bangladesh, as well as to build integration with the government's healthcare digitization initiatives. 

Our goal is to further develop and refine our patient management and clinical decision support platform, addressing the poor technical literacy levels among both key stakeholders—doctors and patients—and ensuring the effective dissemination of our innovative solutions. Given the complexities involved in adopting digitized health systems in settings where technical literacy is limited, the success of such initiatives heavily depends on robust interdisciplinary collaboration with key stakeholders. MIT Solve offers an unparalleled platform for gaining the recognition necessary to catalyze these vital collaborations, facilitating the fusion of efforts across different sectors and disciplines.

Furthermore, we are raising additional  funding to enhance our platform's voice interactive capabilities, supporting additional Bengali dialects, and enriching our clinical decision support system with more comprehensive risk factor analyses. This will not only refine our recommendations but also expand our reach and effectiveness, ensuring more inclusive and personalized healthcare solutions for the diverse population we serve.

AmarDoctor redefines the digital health landscape of Bangladesh by introducing its AI-driven platform tailored for Bengali speakers, breaking new ground in language-specific accessibility. By incorporating innovative AI tools such as voice-interactive triaging, appropriate doctor suggestions, and personalized health advice, it bridges the digital literacy gap, enabling easy primary care access for millions who have historically been deprived of regular access to primary care.

Our approach innovates beyond traditional telemedicine by using AI to give clinicians precise clinical recommendations, combining patients' symptoms and history to streamline consultations. This makes virtual care more appealing to doctors and ensures our clinical decision support system aligns with the health issues prevalent in the South Asian community, enhancing relevance and inclusivity. It also reduces consultation times and cost, making regular access to primary care more affordable.

At the heart of our innovation is our AI-driven remote triaging and clinical decision support system, which is powered by three key components:

• Customized Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and

• Bengali medical Named Entity Recognition (NER) tailored for clinical consultations in Bengali and

• A data reach comprehensive health knowledge graph that creates  a comprehensive connections between diseases, symptoms, medications, and diagnostic tests, with a particular focus on the ethnicity of patients to provide an inclusive, human-centric solution. 

These three components power the AmarDoctor app, making it easily navigable for patients. These advancements also hold the promise of sparking further innovations, paving the way for the creation of more inclusive clinical decision support systems for secondary and tertiary care, personalized medicine, and transforming the landscape of AI-driven clinical interventions in LMIC countries.

Moreover, AmarDoctor introduces personalized health education, adjusted for the patient’s educational level, filling a significant gap in the current dissemination of health information and ensuring patients receive clear, impactful guidance.

AmarDoctor enables doctors from anywhere in the country to offer virtual consultations, overseen by our team to ensure quality. This not only broadens healthcare reach but also prompts a market shift towards more accessible, quality-focused services.

In summary, AmarDoctor's unique, patient-first strategy, complemented by its pioneering features, sets a new paradigm in digital health. It promises to inspire wider adoption of inclusive practices and technologies, redefining healthcare accessibility, inclusivity, and empowerment in the market.

Bangladesh's primary healthcare infrastructure faces significant challenges, notably the absence of a widespread GP or family doctor system. This leads individuals to self-diagnose and directly seek specialist clinics, frequently resulting in unnecessary expenses for consultation fees, medication, and diagnostic tests, along with delays in diagnosis. This situation exacerbates mistrust between patients and healthcare providers, especially among lower socioeconomic groups, who tend to delay seeking medical attention, sometimes until it becomes an emergency. 

With just 2% of GDP spent on health and a chronic shortage of doctors, the traditional approach to health infrastructure development strategy will never be adequate to meet the healthcare needs. An inclusive, digitized solution that offers patients better transparency and empowerment is the only way to ensure timely, affordable, and reliable primary care for the nation's 170 million people.

Unlike typical telemedicine platforms (Doctime, MedEasy), which simply connect patients to doctors via video call and cater to a tech-savvy young population, AmarDoctor’s intelligent health assistant assists patients at every step of their journey. From triaging and finding the right specialist to video consultation, prescription download, and delivering culturally appropriate personalized health education content, this process not only addresses the immediate need for accessible healthcare but also lays the groundwork for a more trustful patient-provider relationship.

For healthcare professionals, AmarDoctor simplifies the management of virtual clinics, enabling them to conduct efficient patient consultations from anywhere. The platform's clinical decision support system streamlines the consultation process with its AI-generated provisional diagnosis recommendation system, potentially saving doctors about 15 hours monthly—time that can be reinvested in patient care.

Furthermore, AmarDoctor will offer healthcare policymakers and key stakeholders (e.g. Health NGOs) access to real-time analytics through a comprehensive web dashboard. This feature provides valuable insights into disease trends, demographic prevalence, and manifestations, facilitating informed public health decisions and strategies.

This model of care, underpinned by data-driven connectivity, proposes to transform the primary healthcare landscape in Bangladesh. By providing evidence from our initial implementations, such as time savings for doctors and improved access for patients, alongside feedback from our target population, we demonstrate a clear pathway from our activities to the desired outcomes. Our theory of change envisions a future where digital health solutions like AmarDoctor significantly enhance healthcare accessibility, efficiency, and satisfaction among Bangladesh's diverse population, encouraging broader adoption of similar technologies in the healthcare market worldwide.

Our impact goals are focused around transforming primary healthcare delivery in Bangladesh through the AmarDoctor platform. Specifically, we aim to enhance access to healthcare services by enabling virtual consultations, reducing the need for travel related to primary care, decreasing overall consultation times, and increasing patient awareness through personalized health education.

Specific Goals and Measurements:

1. Increase Adoption: We plan to facilitate 50,000 consultations in the first year, focusing on integrating 1 million RMG workers in Dhaka into the platform, aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being).

2. Expand Quality Healthcare: In partnership with the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), we are implementing a subsidized virtual care program to enhance digital health technology adoption among historically healthcare-deprived communities. This initiative aims to provide quality primary healthcare to 2 million RMG workers by the end of 2025, supporting SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities.

3. Nationwide Primary Care Services: Collaborating with the Bangladesh Society of General Physicians (BSGP), we aim to deliver affordable primary care to 10 million people across the country by 2029, through deploying our app in 161 Daktarkhana (Doctor Chambers) nationwide and our own B2C campaign. 

4. Reduce Travel for Healthcare: We target a 25% reduction in initial consultation-related travel for at least 50,000 of the facilitated consultations in the first year, addressing the typical four-trip requirement for primary care in Bangladesh and alleviating poverty levels (SDG 1).

5. Increase Digital Health Adoption Among Doctors: We aim to bolster the resilience of the healthcare system by promoting the adoption of scalable digital health technologies. Through targeted social media campaigns, our goal is to onboard 2,000 doctors, aligning with SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure)

Research and Monitoring

In line with our commitment to evidence-based practice, we will conduct both a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) and a Longitudinal Study to evaluate the impact of our interventions. The RCT, conducted in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, UK, and Ibrahim Medical College, Bangladesh, assesses the effectiveness of our remote virtual triaging system in accurately collecting medical symptoms and reducing virtual consultation durations. Our Longitudinal Study focuses on assessing the effectiveness of our AI-powered health assistant and personalized digital health education in improving patients' health-seeking attitudes and their knowledge of frequently occurring diseases and how to manage them, contributing to UN SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being.

Patients access AmarDoctor services including AI-guided triaging, doctor recommendations, appointment booking, and virtual medical consultations through our Android, iOS, or web applications. They can receive prescriptions and personalized health recommendations directly on these platforms.

Doctors use the AmarDoctor platform to manage virtual clinics, handle consultation requests with patient symptoms and vitals presented in SOAP format, and receive AI-generated treatment recommendations and provisional diagnosis.

The core of our technology is a remote triaging system integrated within the app. This system combines a custom Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) engine, trained on 300 hours of Bengali medical conversation data, with a Bengali medical Named Entity Recognition (NER) module to automatically capture the initial symptoms reported by patients.

Further enhancing our application is the Hyper Health Knowledge Graph, developed using insights from 1.4 million patient data points. This graph characterizes relationships between patients, diseases, symptoms, and other relevant entities. Using this knowledge, we guide patients through detailed medical questionnaires akin to those used by medical professionals, ensuring precise symptom capture and appropriate consultation requests to clinicians. It also allows us to systematically incorporate new disease and symptom trend in a data-driven manner and learn and alert our stakeholders.

Our clinical decision support system offers doctors provisional diagnoses and treatment recommendations based on patients' symptoms and medical history. We have developed a multilayered disease prediction model that identifies conditions across 101 disease classes, such as angina and kidney diseases, with 90% accuracy. It also suggests appropriate diagnostic tests and medications, thereby streamlining the consultation process with precise clinical recommendations.

Clinicians have options to issue e-prescriptions or conduct virtual consultations via video calls within the app, and they can refer patients for in-person consultations if necessary. Patients instantly receive prescriptions through the app.


Amar Doctor Key Features Demo : Youtube

Addressing modern challenges of limited attention spans, we are developing culturally appropriate, concise (less than 60 seconds) educational content to enhance patient understanding about a disease and reduce misinformation. Along with e-prescriptions, patients receive personalized health education content in their native language to improve disease management. This approach ensures our consultations are data-driven and effective.

Amar Doctor Health Education Videos : https://www.youtube.com/playli...

Our platform is built for interoperability, designed to integrate with existing healthcare systems, electronic health records (EHRs), wearable devices, and other digital health solutions. It aligns with Bangladesh's health ministry's recent initiative to roll out EHR systems in government hospitals.

2 founders working part time. 
Software engineer and data scientist : 3 full time 
Data scientist : 1 part time 
Physician : 1 part time, 1 full time. 

1 sub-contractor for mobile app development.
1 sub-contractor for content creation.
1 project manager / admin. 

2 years. 

At MedAi, we are deeply committed to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which guide our mission to develop accessible healthcare solutions for diverse populations, particularly the Bengali community. Our leadership, advisory, technical, and operational teams encompass a diverse range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, professional disciplines, and personal experiences. This diversity ensures that our products are culturally sensitive and effectively address the needs of the communities we serve.

We believe that "only a diverse team can craft an inclusive solution." To this end, we actively seek to diversify our team through targeted recruitment and strategic partnerships. 

Internally, MedAi fosters a culture of inclusivity and professional growth. We implement policies that promote respect and growth, and we offer internship opportunities to students from different cultural backgrounds to further enrich our team's diversity. This approach not only enhances our operational effectiveness but also ensures our solutions are developed with a deep understanding of the diverse healthcare needs we aim to address.

Our team members are actively involved in user experience testing and patient interviews, engaging with a wide range of users to refine our offerings and ensure they are truly inclusive. By embedding DEI into every facet of our operations, MedAi is not only advancing healthcare technology but is also fostering an ecosystem that upholds sustainable, inclusive, and equitable health solutions.

AmarDoctor will operate on a dual business model, blending B2C and B2B strategies to deliver value. In our B2C segment, patients use our app to find appropriate doctors with the help of our AI health assistant, book appointments, and receive consultations. This telemedicine platform is free for patients; instead, we charge doctors a facilitation fee for each consultation booked through the app. This model addresses the direct needs of patients seeking convenient healthcare access and supports healthcare providers by streamlining patient acquisition and popularizing the platform.

In the B2B sector, we offer a white-label version of our app and web application to hospitals and other telemedicine platforms, enhancing their existing services with our robust technology. Additionally, we provide API plugins to integrate our solutions, such as disease prediction, speech recognition, and Named Entity Recognition (NER), into other mobile and web apps, helping businesses generate analytical insights from their data.

For government entities (Health Ministry, Ministry of Social Welfare), major health NGOs like the WHO and the World Bank that invest significantly in developing Bangladesh's healthcare sector, we will provide a tiered subscription to customized analytical services. These services will be accessible via interactive dashboards for monitoring disease trends, tracking patients, managing clinical trials, and implementing data-driven health interventions. Additionally, for pharmaceutical companies, our analytics will help them refine production and distribution strategies by providing data-driven insights into disease prevalence and treatment outcomes.

To support our mission of providing accessible healthcare, we have partnered with nonprofit organizations like the Roddenberry Foundation. These partnerships have funded a pilot project to roll out AmarDoctor to female RMG workers, providing them with free virtual medical consultations. We plan to continue securing support from NGOs, family foundations, corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and awards to offer free or heavily subsidized care to populations deprived of healthcare.

To achieve financial sustainability, we are implementing a multi-faceted strategy focused on both immediate revenue generation and long-term funding opportunities.

1. We are raising seed funding to enhance the AmarDoctor app, promote it within Bangladesh, and expand our services to Bengali speakers in India, the UAE, and the UK. This initial phase aims to start generating early revenue streams from our B2C telemedicine platform, which allows direct consumer access to healthcare services.

2. Building on the successful deployment of our solution to monitor heart failure patients at NICVD, we plan to expand our operational footprint by strategically partnering with BSGP and BADAS. We are also in the process of completing Class I Software as a Medical Device regulatory certification for our recommendation system, which will enhance our solution's credibility and facilitate its integration across numerous hospitals for initial patient triaging.

3. Our efforts have been recognized and supported through multiple grants from organizations such as the Roddenberry Foundation and Santander. Moving forward, we plan to secure additional funding from catalytic grants and international NGOs/family foundations.

4.Over the next three years, we anticipate reaching 2 million active users, positioning us to offer unparalleled analytical insights to global organizations like WHO, UNICEF, and Save the Children. We are establishing early partnerships with these development partners to trial our analytical dashboard, aiming to generate at least 25% of our revenue from these contract-based works.

5. By leveraging the research expertise of our co-founders, our ability to support large-scale research initiatives will further solidify our financial sustainability. By applying research methodologies to extensive datasets while ensuring data privacy and security, we will attract further interest and funding from academic and research institutions.

6. We have already provided a bespoke NER solution to Consone AI in the UK and are in early discussions with MedFuse (USA) and PreMedGo (UK) to deliver customized versions of our AI tool suite to improve their services.

Together, these strategies are designed not only to ensure our financial sustainability but also to expand our impact on global health, particularly for underserved Bengali-speaking populations.