Nilesh Aggarwal, Co- Founder, eMediNexus, brings huge healthcare experience to this venture. He is a seasoned healthcare professional who has been running the IJCP Group for the past 6 years. IJCP is a leading medical communications player in India and has been in the market since 1991. Nilesh brings a vast knowledge of the healthcare industry onto the table along with a wide nexus of healthcare professionals who will be collaborating with eMedinexus.
With the rapid pace of how medicine is evolving, it is imperative for doctors to keep updated with the latest news, technologies, procedures, drugs and information. So here is an expert from Nilesh Aggarwal, with Ekta Srivastava, Health Technology, on striving to solve this problem by giving them a one stop learning and networking hub digitally
What is concept underlying eMediNexus and how does it work?
eMediNexus is a doctor network, medical content hub, and advocacy platform for the medical practitioners. The concept behind it is to provide doctors with the last 24 hours in medicine. It’s a free application for doctors to join, share information about their practice, engage in clinical discussions with peers across India of various specialties, and learn from interactive and instructional content.
What are the special key features of the healthcare technology start up?
eMediNexus offers daily news to 200,000 doctors via its newsletter, eMediNews, and also offers various specialty newsletters, via open and closed groups, and conference coverage that is broadcast to doctors across India. Further, eMediNexus hosts interactive instructional content such as cases and quizzes, Continuous Medical Education (CME), as well as physician pertinent petitions in order to support doctor interests when dealing with the government and other key agents in the healthcare ecosystem. Embedded with social media functionalities, eMediNexus can be considered as a mix between a Facebook and LinkedIn for doctors.
What are the challenges faced by the organization?
The major challenge faced by the organisation is converting doctors from across the nation, with varying degrees of technology literacy, onto a digital forum. Furthermore, this challenge is also faced when building channel partnerships with key healthcare associations or other ecosystem engagement.
How to solve the biggest challenges of Indian healthcare?
The biggest problem in Indian healthcare is workforce. There are simply not enough doctors graduating each year in India, and standards for practice remain loosely defined and enforced. eMediNexus aims to improve the fluency of doctors with the latest clinical knowledge and regulatory update to make doctors more effective practitioners across the country. In addition to such initiatives, it is imperative that bottlenecks in the medical colleges or establishment landscape be addressed to introduce more capacity to the sector.
What are the challenges in careers of an Indian Doctor and what are its solutions?
Challenges that Indian doctors face in their careers are multifaceted – bootstrapping their income to establish practices (from nursing homes to hospitals), finding employment across the nation when the ratio of doctors to beds is close to 1:2, and safeguarding themselves from medico legal cases and liabilities. Improved patient flow can come from referrals and second opinions, employment through online and offline supply-demand matching means, and appropriate legal advice to defend against lawsuits which can not only cost financially, but ruin the reputation of doctors. eMediNexus seeks to address all of these by allowing doctors to discuss patient cases in public and private, listing medical talent online for improved discovery, as well as providing a medico-legal cell/Group aimed at answering with legal help the inquiries of doctors across the nation.
Why a doctor should join eMediNexus? How does it help them? What are its benefits?
- Doctors are some of the busiest professionals in India. With an Indian doctor seeing on an average 10 times more patients than his Western counterparts, it gives him/her very less time to go through medical journals, books, CME programs and conferences.
- Through its experienced medical team, eMediNexus makes their job simpler by recognising and summarising key content from journals, books and conferences that are relevant for his/her updation and that can be read through quickly.
- Doctors can also ask for second opinions from their colleagues across India to help in complex cases.
- eMediNexus also provide a team of Medico-legal experts who answer any legal queries that a doctor might face related to medical malpractice, negligence and other legal issues
Case studies – How a very difficult case was solved by doctors in rural India with the help of eMediNexus?
eMediNexus has had several cases of rural doctors directly benefiting from engagement on its platform. One such example is of a General Practitioner in Hoshiyarpur who was treating a patient with sudden breathlessness for over a week with a history of deep vein thrombosis. While all the tests conducted turned out to be normal, the General Practitioner was still suspecting something was wrong and posted on the platform asking for advice. Dr H.K Chopra, a physician and cardiologist saw the post and recommended the doctor to get the patient tested for Pulmonary Embolism and upon performing the tests, it turned out the patient indeed had 3 clots in his lung and was immediately admitted to the intesive care unit (ICU). Had this gone undiagnosed, the patient would probably have died in the next few days specially since Pulmonary Embolism is detected 95% of the times post mortem.
How do you think that technology and apps like these can minimise the doctor -patient ratio in India?
The doctor to patient ratio in India is inadequate, especially if you count only modern medicine doctors. Content focused apps like eMediNexus help keep doctors updated with the latest advancements and clinical cases in medicine so that they can improve their knowledge, diagnose, and treat patients more efficiently and with more precision. eMediNexus also gives the doctors an option to take second opinions from other practitioners on the go thereby reducing the need for the patient to be referred to an already overburdened doctor. Other tele-medicine apps also help patients from across India connect to doctors digitally thereby letting a doctor attend to patients digitally at his/her convenience.
How do you think that technology has changed the face of Indian Healthcare?
Technology is gradually transforming the face of Indian healthcare. For instance, scheduling and discovery of care has been enhanced by digital initiatives, care coordination at hospitals has improved through digital management information systems and health records, and doctors can connect remotely with old and new patients building their business and improve patient outcomes. Furthermore, with offline methods of continuous medical education being restricted to sponsored events that are small in number and not evenly distributed across the country, providing this to doctors round the clock through digital means has transformed the way practitioners can be updated of the latest happenings in medicine.
