Searchlight Leveraging Data Analytics to bring Health Insurance to All
Searchlight Health believes that healthcare in India can be transformed by data analytics. Examples of these can be the ability for Insurers to launch personalized products to drastically improve access, doctors to see previously unseen patterns in care delivery, pharma companies to understand health drivers and large scale real world usage information, etc.
It is now partnering with some of the leading hospitals in the country to make this a reality. Madhu Aravind, CEO, Searchlight Health, reveals more. Excerpts:
BW CIO: How has the journey been for Searchlight Health?
Madhu Aravind: We started Searchlight Health’s business operations in 2015 with the simple premise that healthcare in India can be transformed by data analytics. Examples of these can be the ability for Insurers to launch personalized products to drastically improve access, doctors to see previously unseen patterns in care delivery, pharma companies to understand health drivers and large scale real world usage information, etc.
We believe that by bringing together anonymized patient data, leveraging data that is publicly available and by building best-in-class analytics solutions, healthcare in this country can be more accessible and can create higher impact with available resources.
Initially, it was a challenge to explain our value proposition to hospitals and since such an offering wasn’t tried before, there was no precedence. Gradually, we have been able to demonstrate the value of our offerings and more importantly the business impact for our partner hospitals and the ensuing patient benefits.
We currently work with over 100 hospitals mainly in three cities – Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. By the end of FY 2017-2018, we aim to partner with 200 hospitals and the goal for 2020 is to partner with 1000 hospitals. We partner with some of the leading healthcare institutions in the country like Apollo Hospitals, Manipal Hospitals to name a few.
BW CIO: How big is the healthcare analytics segment globally and in India?
Madhu Aravind: Copious amounts of healthcare data is generated daily by various stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem like hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, drug stores, diagnosis centres, etc. as part of their business operations. Healthcare analytics refers to the science where this data is scientifically analyzed to create technology solutions that improve clinical outcomes, operational efficiency of these businesses, healthcare financing, etc.
Healthcare analytics is a fast growing industry worldwide and is expected to have a total addressable market size in excess of $ 15 billion over the next three years as per various industry estimates. It is at a very nascent stage in India and hence the current market opportunity is probably under $ 100 million. However, with increasing technology adoption and understanding this space too will start growing at a good rate in the years to come.
Regarding competition, the whole health data analytics market itself is very nascent. In nascent markets, competition is never the challenge. It is only about making progress week-to-week, month-to-month. Having said that there are many players from IBM to startups who are using their own entry points to serve the space.
BW CIO: What are the offerings of Searchlight and how do they impact hospitals and health insurers?
Madhu Aravind: Searchlight Health caters to two key segments of Indian healthcare ecosystem currently – hospitals and health insurers. For hospitals, our offerings are the following:
1) Hospital Marketing Cloud: Helps a Hospital with the following functions:
* Opportunity Analysis: enables hospitals to understand the status of the market and the performance of the hospital in a highly granular fashion. The product leverages global proprietary epidemiology data, along with other data sets such as socio-economic indicators, availability of hospital infrastructure to identify demand supply gap at an actionable level.
* Benchmarks: provides hospitals with actionable, business-decision oriented insight into key performance indicators for clinical, operational and financial performance. It helps hospitals identify areas of excellence and areas of improvement by comparing key parameters with competitors, peer group and global standards.
* CRM: Machine learning engine that helps Hospitals to predict the immediate future needs of its customers, thereby ensuring that all the needs of the customers are fully met in a proactive manner.
* Digital Marketer: Leverages the output from “Opportunity Analysis” to create a marketing plan that actually matches the actual granular demand supply gap in each micro market with the services available at a Hospital.
2) Hospital Clinical Cloud: Searchlight Hospital Clinical Cloud enables Hospitals to improve clinical outcomes leveraging machine learning. First use case that is being launched is related to ICU care delivery, where it helps the doctor identify critical clinically relevant events, forewarn them about potential risks and also help improve clinical care protocols.
3) Insurance Cloud: In addition to hospitals, we work with multiple health insurers in India. Our offerings combine nationwide hospital data with powerful modelling tools to help health insurers identify new product and segment opportunities. We also help health insurers understand the cost implications of policy specifications scientifically.
Though we are primarily operating in the B2B space currently, our offerings can bring positive impact to end consumers (public) at large in the medium to long term. By helping hospitals improve clinical care delivery and driving efficiency in operations, we indirectly help in improving the standard of healthcare in the country for patients. By helping health insurers identify new product and segment opportunities, we help improve access to health insurance for millions of people who were uninsured earlier.
BW: Is Searchlight a subsidiary of Piramal? How does the association benefit the parties
Madhu Aravind: Searchlight is a subsidiary of Piramal Enterprise Ltd. Piramal group’s focus on health data analytics is with the conviction that the use of data and analytics will be critical in the successful evolution of the global healthcare system over the next few decades.
Searchlight’s mandate is to fulfill its mission in India by leveraging data analytics to bring health insurance to vast majority of population and enable cost effective and high quality healthcare delivery at scale. Via Piramal group companies, Searchlight gets access to domain expertise spanning 20+ years and a global client base.
BW CIO: What are your future plans?
Madhu Aravind: We have an aggressive plan to build the business, hire a larger team and partner with more hospitals and health insurers over the current fiscal and beyond. By the end of FY 2017-2018, we aim to partner with 200 hospitals and the goal for FY 2020 is to partner with 1,000 hospitals.
Our business model: We operate with the freemium model. We typically begin our engagement with hospitals by signing them up for our standard set of free services for immediate value creation. Based on the evolution of this value that hospitals derive from our standard set of analytic services, they sign up for higher value-added features later which are paid-for.
Team size: For our specific India-focused operations, we have more than 40 people working out of Bengaluru where Searchlight Health is headquartered. For our group’s global health data analytics business, we have more than 250 people based out of India and around 1,000 people worldwide.
