Singapore healthtech firm MyDoc in JV to tackle rising cost of employee healthcare in India

SINGAPORE-BASED healthtech firm MyDoc has formed a joint venture (JV) with India tech solutions company UST Global to tackle employee healthcare in India.

The JV aims to address the rising cost of healthcare and the prevalence of lifestyle-related chronic diseases in the South Asian country.

It has established direct partnerships with healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and diagnostic laboratories to launch MyDoc's digital care model in Bangalore and Mumbai.

The first patients will be UST Global's 14,000 employees throughout India. The company will also deliver healthcare services to banking and technology multinational corporations.

MyDoc, backed by UST Global tech, will identify individual patient health profiles through an integration of objective clinical lab test results and subjective health data from both lifestyle and clinical-grade wearables.

It will also consider the language patients use when describing symptoms and case notes from attending clinical care teams. The technology will help physicians "deliver prognoses and treat patients with greater accuracy and confidence while being freed from administrative tasks and silos".

In Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, MyDoc has ongoing partnerships with insurers such as AIA and Aetna.

Snehal Patel, CEO and co-founder of MyDoc said: "The traditional healthcare market in India is led by hospital-based groups and prices in the sector have increased beyond reach for the middle class".

He added that the average annual increase in healthcare premiums borne by employers have been growing by "as much as 50 per cent since 2005", with premium ratios rising over 110 per cent.

Vas Metupalle, chief medical officer and co-founder of MyDoc, said that in order to combat mounting costs, there needed to be a "shift away from a supply-driven healthcare system organised around what clinicians do, towards a patient-centric system organised around individual patient needs".