Nandico's Innovative Digital Solutions Revolutionising Radiology Services In India
Dr Bharat Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO, Nandico healthcare private limited shares how Nandico is catering to the healthcare workflow problems with special focus on radiology while bringing a positive impact in the lives of patients.
Q-What are some of the shortcomings in the delivery of radiology services for patients in India?
Radiology has emerged as an integral part of healthcare, with a majority of surgical and medical treatment decisions relying on the findings and reports of radiology imaging such as X-rays, CT scans and MRI scans. However, there are a few challenges in delivering effective services to patients such as the shortage of radiologists, heavy workloads on existing infrastructure and costly investigations due to high running costs of services and machines. Slow innovation in healthcare is also a significant challenge, as digitalisation can help solve many issues.
In India, healthcare digitalisation is still in its evolving phase and radiology, in-spite of being a completely a machinery-dependent field, relies heavily on remote work. It feels radiology is stuck on an out-dated practice from 1990’s. E-mails are still used to transfer cases. MRI scans, CT scans, and X-ray images are shared via CDS or on plastic films. It's like the old camera rolls are still alive in the medical industry in this digital era. Patients have to wait long for reports, and avoidable costs (Approximately 80/- per film) are spent on plastic films to share images of scans. To deliver better outcomes, Nandico aspires to create digital solutions to various problems and digitalise the industry.
Q-How has Nandico helped the healthcare to bridge gaps of radiologist shortage in India?
Nandico has developed a cloud based SAAS PACS (Picture archiving and communication system) as one of its first product. It helps radiology centres and hospitals to get reports done by Radiologist Pan-World. Advanced cloud PACS is helping to save lots of time of Radiologist. Turnaround time for reports have improved by 60 Percent. Superior user friendly interface, document integration and advanced billing system has increased the efficacy and productivity of Radiologist. Added advantage is that Radiologists can discuss cases with Clinicians or colleagues via Nandico cloud -based PACS hence helping manage emergency cases.
Q-How is Nandico bringing a positive impact on the lives of patients?
NANDICO’s PACS allows sharing of complete X ray, CT, MRI scans data to patients on their whatsapp as soon as scans are done.Patients don't have to visit centres to collect reports. They can open it on any browser without any application being installed. Patients can share the link for second opinion to their family doctors or specialist’s in any part of world.Also Patients can keep scanned data on NANDICO CLOUD which helps them a lot on follow up visits. At the moment, patients have to undergo repeated radiology scans for higher referrals, thus saving a lot of time.
Q-How is Nandico helping clinicians in treating patients and managing emergencies?
In case of emergency every minute counts a lot. NANDICO is helping neurologist in cases of strokes, orthopedicians and neurosurgeons in trauma cases to name a few examples.
NANDICO helps to manage patient’s data in systematic way. Multiple scans of patient can be viewed on single dashboard of clinician and patients. This is very helpful to manage chronic illness like Cancers, COPD, Neurological disorders, Tuberculosis, Occupational diseases like silicosis, immunological diseases like arthritis, cardiac scans. This helps oncologist, physicians, paediatricians, cardiologist, and pulmonologist to manage data of their patients in all-new digital way. It is coming out as a blessing for surgeons including general surgeons, Onco, Gastro, CTVs and Neurosurgeons to plan their surgery. They can discuss scans with their colleagues also.
Q-How many installations do Nandico currently have? How many cases does Nandico deal with every day?
Starting 2 years back (in 2021), Nandico has crossed more than 700 installations Pan-India including Medical Colleges, Diagnostic Centres, Corporate Hospitals, PPP setups, Diagnostic chains and Tele-radiology companies.
Now, NANDICO has its foot prints in every corner of India. We have uploaded more than 1 million cases on our servers. We have our presence marked even in the likes of U.S.A. and Africa. Many renowned corporate groups are now part of Nandico family. That's a blessing for us.
Q-How do you think Nandico is different from other healthcare care players in the country?
NANDICO is the brain child of Radiologists who are Alumni from pioneering institutes of India including SGPGI (Lucknow), Medanta (Gurugram), Lilawati (Mumbai) and developed by Ex-engineers from the top most companies of world like Microsoft, Flipkart etc.
Currently, 90 percent of our business is generated from referrals. Radiologists are referring our product to their colleagues and every day we get new installation requisites. This verifies that Nandico is unique in itself.
Q-As a tech-enabled healthcare provider, how is NANDICO leveraging technology to enhance patients and radiologists experience and improve healthcare outcomes?
With the aim to build Nandico as a technology-first healthcare provider, we are regularly investing in technology to deliver best-in-class outcomes to our users. At our centre, we are developing various models which will be an augmenting experience of radiologist, clinicians and patients as never before. Nandico will further implement Artificial Intelligence to assist radiologists in reporting, including image annotation in reports.
We believe Digitalisation will transform Healthcare outcomes in very near future. We have made investments to build milestone-based delivery capability.
