How knowyourmeds is leaning on data to overhaul patient care in India

The start-up is gaining popularity as an app that reminds you to take your medicine but its impact could be a lot more in the coming years

With technology increasingly entering healthcare, a start-up founded by American-Indian serial entrepreneurs Venkat Srinivasan and Kim Shah is bringing drug information to patients through an artificial intelligence-based assistant.

Knowyourmeds, a Boston- and Pune-based venture, offers an eponymous app to consumers in various countries, including India, for pill reminders. The offering, however, goes far beyond, wherein the intelligent platform is able to alert users of drug-to-drug interactions (if a user is taking medicines for multiple conditions) and potential side effects based on the biological data of the user.

“The idea is how can we mitigate drug errors, how can make the entire healthcare process more efficient,” says Shwetika Kumar, director product, Knowyourmeds and manager of India operations at the company.

“People self-medicate a lot here. They are popping pills all the time. The drugs they take may interact with new medicines. In fact, pharmacists these days play the role of doctors, without really trying to understand the history of the patient. As a result, the disease burden is increasing, which can be mitigated by being more informed,” says Kumar.

Knowyourmeds, which was launched in US in 2018 and in India a year later, has a simple flow. Users sign up by filling in preliminary information like ethnicity, place of birth, and age, followed by details of medical conditions—how long has the condition persisted, drug that being taken, at what times of the day, and so on.

The data feeds into a system that then serves by way of dose reminders through the day, reminders to visit the doctor for routine check-ups, and alerts to track vitals like weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, and heart rate at regular intervals.

The second bit is preventing side effects. Knowyourmeds has put together the world’s largest data on drugs side effects, built on top of 50 million records from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), says Kumar. Patients also regularly feed in when they suffered side effects from a particular drug.

The intelligent system maps side effects to the ethnic and demographic profiles of the user, who suffered the side effect, there by being able to determine at scale co-relations between drug side effects and patients' profiles.

“We take side effects data from WHO, and also our user report side effects on the app. So, on the basis of that, we can now do predictive analysis. Based on the data, and user profiles information, we could tell someone with a similar profile that he or she may face a certain side-effect,” says Kumar.

“When we have more data, we’ll be able to tell you about efficacy of the treatment you are taking- How effective is treatment for your particular demographic, your ethnicity and your age.”

Knowyourmeds is all but a team of 20-odd people, most of whom are in Pune. The start-up is part of Intelligent Machine Lab, an AI- and ML-focused company whose other units include lending platform eCredit and tutoring service EnglishHelper. Venkat Srinivasan, founder Intelligent Machine Lab and chairman Knowyourmeds, had earlier founded software firm Rage Frameworks and sold it to Genpact in 2017.

For day to day operations, Knowyourmeds is spearheaded by chief executive Kim Shah, who was earlier a global director for marketing at Thermo Fisher Scientific, a $20 billion biotech company.

Knowyourmeds currently has 30,000 registered used, 5,000 of which are from India. The app is present in US, Canada and Mexico.

"We built KnowYourMeds as a digital health assistant that uses machine intelligence to inform and guide doctors and patients develop and maintain healthy habits - taking their meds on time, refilling prescriptions, self-monitoring of key health metrics, being current with vaccines and going for regular check-ups,” says Shah.

In India with non-communicable disease accounting for a large percentage of the disease burden (55 per cent) digital interventions that help to inculcate and incentivize healthy habits could lead to large public health impact and improved health outcomes,” says Shah.