Dozee: Revolutionising Indian Healthcare, One Hospital Bed at a Time

Dozee is an exciting addition to our portfolio. It has pioneered contactless, continuous remote patient monitoring (RPM) in hospitals and at home, delivering unparalleled patient safety and maximising the utilisation of ICU beds. Employing Ballistocardiography (BCG)- a non-invasive technique that measures micro-vibrations to capture cardiac contractions, respiration metrics, body movements, as well as other events such as snoring, seizures, and tremors- to monitor vitals, Dozee’s offering works to analyse, forewarn, and thereby improve its users’ cardiac, respiratory and sleep health. Their solution has medical-grade accuracy, is simple to deploy and maintain, and is incredibly cost-effective.

At a time characterised by increased health consciousness on account of the pandemic and a deepening consumer and business focus on India’s shifting disease profile, rising healthcare costs, inadequacy of public healthcare etc., Dozee has the potential to revolutionise Indian healthcare, one hospital bed at a time.

Nursing and other healthcare staff have also been experiencing increasing rates of burnout. In a recent survey-based study, 37.6% of the sampled nurses working at intensive care units reported experiencing high burnout.1 In yet another study, more than half of the respondents complained of pandemic-related burnout, with doctors being 1.64 times and support staff being 5 times more likely to experience pandemic-related burnout.

Rising healthcare costs combined with India’s uncharacteristically high out-of-pocket expenditure on health has further exacerbated the situation. Moreover, India’s disease profile is changing– the disease burden is increasingly being dominated by non-communicable diseases (NCDs). According to a WHO report, NCDs accounted for 66% of deaths in India in 2019. Over 2.5 million deaths were caused by cardiovascular diseases, 1.15 million by chronic respiratory diseases, and almost 3,50,000 by diabetes.

A compromise in the amount & quality of sleep has resulted in a faster onset of some of these conditions. A survey by Fitbit found that its Indian users were the least active and second most sleep-deprived globally.

To make matters worse, a large number of Indians, more than 500 million, are at risk of hypertension, stroke, cardiovascular diseases, etc., thereby necessitating thorough and continuous monitoring.

Dozee’s Solution

With machine learning techniques, microelectronics miniaturisation, Wi-Fi and 4G connectivity, and an increasingly educated population, there is an opportunity to turn this tide.

Enter Dozee

"From food delivery to booking a cab, everything is now at our fingertips. But healthcare still lags behind in giving that comfort. I want to change this." - Mudit Dandwate (co-founder of Dozee)

Using Ballistocardiography (BCG), Dozee’s product offering involves the placement of a thin sensor sheet under the mattress thereby converting any standard bed into a step-down ICU. It contactlessly tracks heart rate, respiration, cardiac performance, blood pressure, sleep and heart rate variability. It also comes with additional components to monitor oxygen saturation, ECG and temperature. Dozee then uses AI algorithms to generate an Early Warning Score enabling early detection of health deterioration for timely medical intervention to provide unmatched patient safety.

Dozee’s easy to use interface provides a stress-free experience to the user for gathering, retrieving, and engaging with the recorded health data. The whole tech-suite places the user at the centre and operates seamlessly to offer a range of services.

Dozee for Hospitals

Dozee’s solution has proved to be especially helpful for hospitals, allowing for the conversion of regular ward beds into step-down ICUs, streamlining vitals monitoring for hundreds of patients on a single dashboard, digitalising early warning alerts generation, automating critical care outreach, optimising nursing efficiency, and maximising ICU bed throughput. It allows the hospital healthcare staff to make data-backed clinical decisions thereby easing their patient burden.

Clinical studies have shown that Dozee alerts healthcare providers 8 hours in advance of patient deterioration. Dozee saw widespread adoption of its solution across public healthcare establishments because of their critical role in helping hospital administrations manage the COVID-19 pandemic. With its ease of use and minimal training requirements, Dozee has been able to achieve strong penetration in previously neglected regions by strengthening secondary and tertiary health infrastructure at the level of district and sub-district hospitals in India.

The installation of Dozee devices at a hospital sets up the provision for risk scoring through the Dozee Early Warning Score (DEWS). Based on this score, daily factor reports are created and shared with doctors and nurses, helping prioritise high risk patients and improve clinical outcomes through smart alert triggers. As alluded to earlier, each patient’s risk status can easily be accessed as part of a centralised web dashboard through a mobile app or on TVs installed in hospital premises. The remote monitoring enabled by the device lowers human exposure and risk of infections, diminishes the risk of manual error and saves time for both nurses and doctors.

A Snapshot of Dozee's Impact in 2023

In a short span of time Dozee has helped save more than 10,000 lives, and improve health outcomes for a lot many others. The figure below gives a snapshot of Dozee’s positive impact:

Given Dozee’s early yet nevertheless giant strides towards fixing India’s broken healthcare system, it further aims to be an integral part of the transformation of healthcare for secondary and tertiary services in states and districts in India. Building on the Government’s vision of ensuring universally accessible healthcare, Dozee has launched the ‘Million ICU Initiative’- an ambitious endeavour to address the massive shortage of ICU beds in public hospitals to alleviate the immense load on both the healthcare infrastructure as well as the concerned staff. Dozee intends to convert 1 million public hospital ward beds into step-down ICUs with the installation of its remote sensing devices through this initiative. Coupled with nurse and doctor training on the use of concerned devices and their features, this initiative enables the setting up of a 24x7 central patient monitoring cell and a holistic contactless remote health monitoring platform.

The Million ICU Initiative has been an extraordinary success, impacting 54,273 lives in 323 hospitals across 14 states within 18 months.

Recent Milestones

Dozee’s proprietary contactless vital signs (VS) measurement technology received US FDA 510(k) clearance, paving the way for the company to bridge healthcare gaps in India and other emerging markets by delivering world-class medical devices in line with its vision of ‘Make in India, Made for the World’. The company also recently received its first US patent for its revolutionary contactless cardiac assessment technology, harnessing micro-vibrations. Dozee’s good work has been duly recognised for its potential to transform healthcare delivery in India. It was one of the winners of the prestigious Innovation for India Awards 2023 by Marico Innovation Foundation which seeks to empower first-to- the-world innovations that hold the potential to generate large-scale impact. Dozee also received an award for Digital Innovation in Healthcare at the FICCI Healthcare Excellence Awards 2022. As a partner to Apollo Hospitals in its Enhanced Connected Care Programme, Dozee helped ensure zero code blue events over 200 days— a remarkable demonstration of its commitment to patient safety.

As an independent assessment partner, Sattva Consulting recently conducted a retrospective impact assessment study on the impact and potential of Dozee’s devices across the public healthcare system in India. The findings were overwhelmingly positive. Some of the major findings have been highlighted below.

The impact assessment study found that approximately 1600 more patients could potentially be treated at a mid-sized public hospital on account of more efficient hospital bed utilisation. When extrapolated to cover the entire public healthcare system, this number crosses the 12 million mark on an annual basis.

If scaled for use across secondary and tertiary hospitals, the Million ICU initiative can catalyse total potential savings of INR 2,881+ Cr for the public healthcare system in India.