FROM THE FIRST TOUCHPOINT TO THE LAST MILE

As India’s first – and amongst the nation’s few truly comprehensive Telehealth systems - Aamod Wagh’s brainchild has been steadily healing key healthcare metrices. 

MEET THE LEADER

Aamod Wagh is the Co-founder & CEO of RHEMOS Health – a company with a mission to enable easy access to hospital grade and patient-centric care for all citizens of this planet, at any-time and anywhere. 

Aamod has decades of global experience in the IT Services, Strategic Consulting & Healthcare industry, having been a CEO and a part of the Executive Management teams in multi-national companies. He has managed diverse teams & worked across multiple location in the US, UK, EMEA & Australasia. He has recently moved back to India - after spending decades in the USA - for his startups. 

In the recent past, he has spent time in developing a world class bleeding edge IoT solution for remote health monitoring & virtual care. His focus has largely been on addressing healthcare challenges faced by patients at home, rural patients, chronic patients and preventive care / wellness challenges faced by families - especially after the pandemic. 

Aamod and his family are committed animal rights activists & contribute significantly to saving & caring for homeless & stray animals in India.

THE BIG IDEA

We are thrilled to catch up with Aamod Wagh. The mission is simple : To pick the brain of a dynamic leader on various aspects of contemporary and future healthcare. We begin with the one big idea, concept or philosophy that defines Aamod the persona. What is his approach to life, and his success mantra? Aamod shares…

“As mentioned above, the one big idea for our business is to ensure “Healthcare.. Anywhere” for all citizens. In terms of the philosophy that defines us, we strongly believe in ‘Live and Let Thrive”. It always ‘takes a village’ and we believe that collective minds and ideas help create rising tides that benefits one and all. As a result, we foster and encourage collaborations, partnerships and alliances across the world, to meet and exceed our goals & achieve our dreams.

GENESIS AND EVOLUTION 

How exactly did the idea turn into the transformative force that it is today? Was there any person or life-altering experience or turning-point that caused it or inspired it? Aamod turns the clock back to give us a peek into the formative curve…

“After living abroad for almost two decades, it was quite a surprise to witness that India - a country known for its leadership in technology – was not leveraging its primary assets for providing basic human needs of health & safety to its own citizens – especially to our seniors & elders living alone and to 80% of our rural population living in underserved areas. We had always seen the concept of “Universal Healthcare” painted as an insurmountable dream, and we took it upon ourselves to leverage technology to transform that dream into a reality. This was the genesis of RHEMOS – an acronym for ‘Remote Health Monitoring System’. 

THE NEXT BIG MILESTONE

What are the big KPI’s that drive his teams today? What is the next disruption in his crosshairs? What are the nagging healthcare challenges he wants to take on now? We swich quickly from the past to the future, letting Aamod steer the ship forward for our readers… 

“The goal has always been to deliver affordable & hospital grade care to any and all patients, at their location. The primary hurdles for achieving this were identified as:

1. Non-availability of qualified doctors & nurses across 80% of the country

2. Lack of infrastructure like power & WiFi in rural areas

3. High costs for setting up a basic hospital grade clinic / PHC facility

4. Lack of portability of medical grade equipment forcing patients to visit clinics to receive good quality healthcare - instead of receiving care at home

Our focus is to eliminate, or at least reduce, the above dependencies to enable us to meet our objectives.

DECODING THE PRODUCT

We urge the idea leader to hand-hold us over his product terrain – the features, impactors and unique differentiators. Aamod gamely obliges…

“Based on the objectives and visions I mentioned, we designed the RHEMOS Health Ecosystem as India’s first and only truly comprehensive Telehealth system that combines unique hand-held medical grade devices with a Telemedicine platform & health analytics – all under a single roof.”

ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, ANYONE

“RHEMOS mobile devices can be pocket carried to any location to measure up to 35 health markers (critical vitals, blood & urine diagnostics, auscultations) at the point-of-care and instantly transmit all test results to our platform for remote access by Doctors.”

LAST MILE READY

“The devices are sensor based and easy to use – thus ensuring that even Asha workers can use them for ‘last mile’ care, reducing dependency on qualified medical professionals at PoC. All devices work on battery & Bluetooth – eliminating the need for power & WiFi at PoC.”

POCKET FRIENDLY

“Devices are designed to be extremely affordable, to reduce the cost and time of setting up a hospital grade PHC to deliver high quality care. The small device size and portability ensures that they can be easily carried into homes, to ensure that seniors or pregnant women do not have to undertake long & difficult commutes to receive their basic right to good healthcare.”

AN ENABLING ECOSYSTEM 

“We have joined hands with a partner for delivering a comprehensive Telehealth platform with over 5000 Doctors available online. The platform is seamlessly integrated with all RHEMOS devices and provides a complete set of remote telemedicine services including creation of a Ayushman Bharat ID, capturing patient profile, symptoms and 10 to 35 vitals, providing tele-consultation with live Doctors on demand, and generating prescriptions - which are delivered to the patient’s home. The platform’s AI Analytics module studies the vitals for every patient to generate comprehensive patient health analytics & population analytics reports automatically.”

MEASURABLE AND SIGNIFICANT IMPACT 

“Based on the above unique capabilities, over the past 2 years, we have been able to enable the delivery of hospital grade care for the first time to remote villages across 18 States thru 100+ healthcare providers and are impacting almost 300,000 patient visits every month in urban & rural India and also across 10 countries.”

We also wanted to ensure that we provide “Sustainable Healthcare” and do our bit to save our environment. We realized that there was a direct & significant impact that remote health monitoring had on carbon emissions. Based on a US study of 3 million telemedicine consultations done between 2020 and 2022, the results showed that Telemedicine avoided 53 million miles and 1.8 million hours of travel, $33 million in travel cost, and eliminated 22000 metric tons of Co2, 14 metric tons of hydrocarbons, 210 metric tons of exhaust carbon monoxide, and 10 metric tons of exhaust nitrogen oxide emissions. In India, with eSanjeevani recording 170,000 Teleconsultations every day, we are recording well over 100 million teleconsultations every year. Based on above estimates, we can safely assume that Telemedicine in India has also resulted in reducing CO2 emissions by 750,000 metric tons along with other pollutants.

A WORD ABOUT VOH

Aamod’s team has been engineering exactly the kind of difference a fast-developing nation needs. We wish Aamod the very best in his journey, and sign off an edifying and inspirational session by requesting him to share a few words about Voice of Healthcare. How, according to him, can tribute profiles such as Idea Leaders are important to add direction, inspiration and positive energy to the healthcare community? The dynamic young change-maker generously shares…

“We believe that all industries need a trusted neutral body and a platform to identify major industry issues, jointly find innovative and sustainable solutions and share learnings to ensure that the industry can progress to meet its social and financial goals. We see VOH playing this part very successfully by bringing various industry stakeholders together under a single roof for enabling the true transformation of the Healthcare industry.”

*This story is published by VOH team.*