In a somewhat prophetic style, US presidential hopeful Joe Biden had, over a year ago, remarked even a country as advanced as the USA was not prepared for a pandemic and stressed on better healthcare infrastructure. Today, India is battling one of the worst healthcare crises in over a century; and the gaping lapses in insurance, critical care, healthcare delivery models and talent are becoming all too evident.

The time seems ripe to propel the nation to a digital-first approach towards managing these gaps in healthcare. The government has already rolled out health insurance through Ayushman Bharat, whose federated IT architecture will be used to model the broader National Digital Health Mission (NDHM).

In light of these developments, some futuristic tech startups in healthcare feel their moment of reckoning is here. Artivatic is one of them. The company, started in late 2017 by Puneet Tandon and Layak Singh, is an asset-light insurtech & healthtech platform that provides end-to-end lifecycle focused products, solutions & APIs using AI, ML & data. The startup addresses risk assessment, fraud intelligence, smart underwriting, claims servicing and branch servicing, in addition to sales, marketing and customer acquisition through 200+ APIs and six core products.

The company was one of the winners of the RAISE2020 Startup Challenge. Tandon and Singh chanced upon this idea of creating an insurance platform while working on their earlier venture Cogxio, which was focused on a networking platform for health and finance and realised how tedious it is to claim insurance and health benefits despite paying for it. Their agile solution can significantly simplify complex, manual and legacy processes. 

Artivatic uses AI for medical image analysis, profiling & recommendation, documents reading/extraction, risk analysis and fraud detection, decision making and preventive health analysis. To solve problems in insurance and health, AI is crucial in solving these problems end-to-end, to offer personalized, risk based insurance, building new age insurance products to mass market. AI is also crucial to help understand health data and images to build patient advisory, medical risk and claims processing.

One of their six core products is Darvin, a 360 insurtech & health ecosystem built for patient, provider and payer. This platform connects with hospitals and providers through a unique platform where they connect to patient data, build risk analysis, enable file claims, OPD expenses, health cards and more. This system connects via APIs to multiple systems towards providers for data analysis, risk and decision making, and then connects to payers for instant quality data driven risk and decisions for claims payouts, health benefits and more. The system also provides patients health advisories, recommendations, personalized health benefits, insurance and access to finance. 

“This is a three-way platform as an ecosystem connect. Patients can also upload their medical records, KYC, family details, and buy insurance too. Product development has now shifted from just product or platform to an AI-first platform. An AI-first product also enables innovators to empower the customer by providing digital options, virtual connects and more. Every product that is designed will be customer centric, to be used from anywhere, any time,” explains Singh.

India’s healthcare sector is highly complex, fragmented in terms of data assimilation and often, it’s the patient that pays a heavy price. One of the biggest challenges to large scale digitisation of healthcare using AI is the nature of scattered and improperly documented data. “While initial steps like NDHM and Ayushman Bharat are extremely valuable, the ground level implementation has to improve to ensure affordable healthcare with low cost insurance. AI can provide need based health insurance/healthcare access with utilizing data and providing personalized health recommendation/prevention,” adds Singh.