At Drishti Eye Care, looking beyond eyes

Can a doctor treat a patient without physically examining him? Can he treat him with any degree of success? Will the patient feel he has been given attention? And will more patients be willing to consider this approach?

These are some of the questions and answers Karnataka’s Drishti Eye Care will be answering soon as it enters the telemedicine space in the state with its latest round of funding.

After having achieved a certain scale in eyecare in the state, Drishti is expanding into three areas: skincare, diabetes and ENT. The three areas are all non-invasive, don’t face emergency situations and have a large untreated population. It is estimated that 15-20 per cent of derma walk-ins are afflicted by serious skin ailments, 22 per cent of the population is either diabetic or at the pre-diabetes stage, and almost 7 per cent of the population has hearing problems. In the future, the company plans to look at pediatric care (barring emergencies), pulmonology and psychiatry. To start with it has started with a pilot project for the three new areas at its Kanakpura centre.

The founders decided to expand into telemedicine when they saw how acute the shortage of specialists was in the more remote areas. “A lot of our patients who walked in for eye care needed treatment in diabetes or ENT but simply had nowhere to go. Many would need to travel out of their village and incur significant expense to get some ailment treated. Often, since the ailment is not life threatening, they just tend to ignore it,” explains founder Kiran Anandampillai, a former employee of Infosys.

As things stand, there is an acute shortage of specialists across all specialties in most states in India, not just Karnataka. Almost 80 per cent of the government posts for specialists in smaller talukas and villages lie vacant. Most specialists tend to stay in larger urban centres.

Karnataka alone has over 150 talukas that lack specialists. Each of these towns supports a population of anywhere between 0.24-0.4 million from villages around them. The company found that a significant proportion of the patients who come in for eyecare also needed specialist intervention — particular for ENT and diabetes. “Moreover, we don’t see specialists moving to smaller taluka towns anytime soon”, says Anandampillai.

It was in 2010 that Anandampillai sold some of his stock in Infosys, quit his job and decided that he wanted to do something that had social impact, would be self sustaining and scalable. It was then that he met his co-founder Rajesh Babu, who had been working at Naryan Netralaya, and they set up Drishti in Karnataka. In 2012, Drishti launched its first centre with mostly personal funds of the founders. But they proved that the idea had merit before launching their second hospital in 2015,receiving funding from Lok Capital. Recently, Lok Capital has infused more money into the venture. It has also been funded by Nandan Nilekani’s family foundation since. 

“We spent over two-and-a-half-years to figure out all the elements of the eyecare model before we started expanding. Now that most of the elements are well understood, we have started scaling it up at a pace that we think will keep the model sustainable,” says Anandampillai. 

From when it started — in 2012 — till December 2016, Drishti has treated close to 218,000 patients, sold over 55,763 eye glasses, conducted 1,536 village camps, and performed over 5,725 eye surgeries. Drishti currently has 101 employees (it expects this to rise to around 180 in a year from now). Of this, eight are full-time opthamologists and five are specialist consultants.

To take the new project forward, Drishti, in May 2016, inducted Balu Seetharam, an engineer who has had a corporate career with Wipro and Vodafone. Seetharam says that after spending many years in the corporate space, he feels he is passionate to do something in the healthcare sector that can benefit the rural disadvantaged, and that’s why he’s joined Drishti, a much smaller player than his past employers.

Other than the right team, Anandampillai says that the success of something untested and untried in India like this requires a range of things to fall in place: reliable and high-speed bandwidth that can deliver a HD experience, diagnostic devices that enable doctors to perform remote diagnosis, predictable availability of specialists at scheduled times, easy availability of drugs and diagnostics prescribed by specialists in local markets, among others. 

Doctors need to be confident that they can provide an accurate diagnosis over the link and the patient clinical outcome will determine the eventual success or failure of the approach. 

But perhaps above all, patients need to develop faith that they can be treated without being examined physically and be convinced that early intervention and treatment can actually prevent a nagging problem from becoming a serious ailment.