Shelley Saxena, Founder & CEO, Sevamob Worldwide, more than one billion people lack access to primary healthcare due to the remoteness of their locations. While community health workers relentlessly aim at changing this norm by bringing life-saving care to the doorsteps of people or setting up pop-up clinics, the initiatives are not powerful enough to provide superior care. Part of the difficulty in delivering last-mile healthcare, in addition to the human and financial constraints, is the lack of infrastructure that is not equipped to reach these far-flung environments. In most cases, the healthcare specialists would not even travel to the distant, isolated areas, adding to the pain points. With an aim to optimize the primary healthcare market, Sevamob, an Atlanta-based last-mile healthcare provider, implements artificial intelligence (AI) enabled triage, consultation, and diagnostics services at the point of care of patients.
“We identify the gaps in the current healthcare delivery model and try to fill that with AI implementations,” says Shelley Saxena, Founder and CEO of Sevamob. Currently targeting the Indian and Southern African healthcare market, Sevamob employs a B2B business model where their primary customers are employers, schools, corporate CSR, hospitals, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies.
Underpinned to provide their unique last-mile healthcare service, Sevamob’s delivery model has three touch points. Firstly, the company sets up onsite popup clinics with physicians for comprehensive primary health care. Secondly, the company provides telehealth services in case a specialist is unable to visit a location, or the diagnosis requires a second opinion. Thirdly, and what distinguishes the company from its contenders, is its novel AI-based API for diagnosis and consultation that can operate entirely offline. Unlike most health-tech companies that require partnering with a healthcare provider to get access to patient data, Sevamob generates their data, giving them an additional edge when it comes to developing models for AI.
We identify the gaps in the current healthcare delivery model and try to fill that with AI implementations
The company began its first phase of AI-enabled services by identifying patients with malnourishment. Sevamob identified the multi-vitamin and mineral deficiencies of the patient and accordingly recommended a diet plan. Later, the company extended its AI-based diagnosis to skin infections, vision problems, and blood analysis. Today, Sevamob has achieved an accuracy rate of 85 percent in detecting almost all common forms of fungal infections and more than 90 percent accuracy in identifying patients with diabetic retinopathy and cataract, and none of these detections require an ophthalmologist or dermatologist.
The effectiveness of Sevamob’s AI-based implementations can be substantiated by its delivery of healthcare services to Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL), an Indian state-owned oil and gas company that had issues regulating a uniform employee health management service. The client had to partner with different health providers in various parts of the country, and thus the employee health data were siloed and lacked in providing an overall employee health visibility. More so, a majority of their employees consisted of oil tank drivers—always traveling to remote and distant places—and thus vision problem and infectious disease were two key concerns for the corporation. Employing Sevamob, IOCL could bring uniformity to their entire employee health management service and gather all employee data in a centralized dashboard and simultaneously provide healthcare benefits for the drivers in remote locations. Starting off by servicing two cities for IOCL, today Sevamob handles IOCL’s employee health for 25 cities.
Talking about the impact AI-based diagnosis would bring to the current healthcare market, Shelley says, “I don’t think of it as a replacement for doctors or any medical staff; it only assists medical professionals in delivering better healthcare facility.” As an on-going pursuit, he mentions that Sevamob shall continue to outgrow its innovations to provide more enhanced healthcare facilities for care-deprived locations.
