HealthX Capital

Seemant Jauhari

1. In your opinion, how has the MedTech Startups landscape evolved over the years? What are some of the advantages of the current technological evolution?

It is important to shed light on the context and drivers of healthcare in the Asian region. Asia is home to around 60 percent of the global population, of which roughly greater than 25 percent is likely to be aged beyond 60 years. Further, almost 50 percent of the global chronic disease burden is likely to be in Asia. There is a very huge need for healthcare for this needy population. However, we are woefully short of the required resources. With less than 1.25 doctors per 1000 patients and less than 2.45 nurses per 1000 patients, the gap is too large to bridge the demand and supply within healthcare. Here is where technology is fundamental to healthcare and the reason why we are witnessing growth in this space in the region. Technology is enabling innovation in business models, products and services such that healthcare is increasingly becoming more accessible & affordable to the patient population.

In the last decade, health tech startups have evolved from innovation in business models to innovation in Intellectual Property. Now, we are witnessing startups that are creating healthcare data assets and analyzing the same to predict or provide valuable insights to multiple stakeholders. From roughly $5billion invested in 2019 to projected capital investments of $20 billion in 2025, the space in APAC is likely to witness steady and increasing capital. This signals rapid growth in the startup ecosystem. Roughly 40 percent of this investment is going into South and South East Asia, with a roughly equal split between the two sub-regions. The evolution can be seen in waves, and the first wave was mostly into bringing efficiencies into the healthcare ecosystem by way of business model innovations. The initial cohort of startups witnessed momentum in the online consolidation of demand for one or more services. For example, several online platforms for clinic management, appointment booking, pharmacy delivery, surgery, and more, came-up, such as Pharmeasy, Homage, Medfin, Speed doc, Halodoc and many others. All these took years to scale, as scaling such services was correlated to the local regulation and consumer adoption.

Subsequently, data-driven AI related startups were another area that emerged in South and SEA, given the relatively easier access to data. These included startups that trained algorithms to ready pathology images, MRIs, X-rays, and others, so that the pathologists/radiologists could read images more efficiently and accurately, for example, Sigtuple, Qure.ai and others. Thereafter came the data analytics-related startups which had access to data associated with a single specialty, and they mined information to create insights/solutions to a variety of problems that needed to be solved by the pharma/provider sector. Holmusk, Biofourmis, Child Health Imprints, THB all belong to this category.

“Technology is enabling innovation in business models, products and services such that healthcare is increasingly becoming more accessible & affordable to the patient population”

Lastly, the med-tech space which is more associated with medical devices/hardware-related startups is still at a nascent stage of the innovation life cycle, given the longer sales cycles involved and the relatively slower scale in the region. My belief is that device related IP innovation will for the next few years largely scale more in the western markets, and once its scaled and gathered experience there, it will make its way back to Asia, or until then scale relatively slowly in this region.

Key Advantages of Technology Evolution
•Technology has made several healthcare services accessible to people, given the high mobile phone and PC/internet penetration in Asia. For example, today, one can virtually consult a doctor through one of the online tele-consult platforms, get an e-prescription, order pharmacy home and order other services like nursing at home. •Technology has enabled better efficiency, accuracy and hence better outcomes in diagnosis. For example, AI in healthcare has increased throughput in reading images, and identifying problem areas in scans more accurately.