Our Journey Towards Personalized Health

The 11th year of our entrepreneurship journey seemed like a good time to reflect on the professional and personal drivers for our decision to move from formal to self-employment.????

Saathealth: The origin story

What we do today at Saathealth started with a chance conversation with some really forward-thinking colleagues in 2008, discussing ways to create a more participative role for patients in their health journeys. Since then, through our work in a variety of disease areas, working with urban and rural populations, with private and public health organizations, we’ve continued to advance the thesis that co-opting patients in their health journey, thoughtfully and deliberately, is the only way to create the best health experiences of the future.?

Today, Saathealth uses behaviour change sciences, digital platforms, and machine learning algorithms to provide precision digital health solutions. The goal is to empower patients, reduce the burden on healthcare suppliers, improve outcomes and do so at a cost that doesn’t burden our future generations. Saathealth’s modular behavioral health platform can be adapted to deliver positive outcomes for any indication, in any geography.??

Our journey began with trying to influence health choices of the urban poor in busy areas of Mumbai & Delhi. For a typical family in urban slums, having credible, contextual information and access to local health services can mean the difference between life & death! We launched our platform reaching over 110,000 users to improve children’s health awareness and impact amongst such families in urban India.?

With public health partners, we are now deploying our platform for different use cases to show impact at scale. At the peak of the 2nd wave of the pandemic last year, while our team was actively working on creating & disseminating health content to battle the wave, we realised the wide gap that exists between health-seekers and providers of health services. There was an opportunity to bridge this gap using a digital platform, tailored to the needs of vernacular populations in India, to both inform and empower them with access to better health. We modified our previously successful children’s health app and relaunched it in January 2022 with additional content and features to cater to the health needs of the entire family. This family health intervention, funded by ACT grants is on track to influence positive health outcomes with 500,000 families across India this year alone!

Saathealth recently formed its first advisory board that includes global healthcare leaders from organizations like McKinsey, Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis.

?Committing to lifelong learning as entrepreneurs

Aditi and I sometimes laugh at how crazy we were to jump into entrepreneurship with a young child, dependent parents and a mountain of housing debt, more than eleven years back. But we managed to ride the lows and the highs and are richer for the experience of having walked the paths we did.

Entrepreneurship can be a tiring and lonely journey. The constant uncertainty can definitely wear someone down. All entrepreneurs must deal with the anxiety of paying salaries at the end of a month, finding the time to balance the tactical tasks with the strategic thinking, keeping spirits up at all times and constantly resolving situations that there is no available template for, all of this adds to the strain.?

But while it’s not easy, there is the benefit of having the space to experiment, explore, make mistakes, acknowledge them and go back to the drawing board. That may not sound like a lot, but it is a gift for lifelong learners, which we all will need to be in the future.

The big wins for us are the valuable relationships we have built with individuals and institutions that have allowed us the opportunity to continue to learn and move forward.

We have met some incredibly smart lateral thinkers in our journey, who created the need and the space for us to think and implement solutions that challenged the norm. Our work, the accolades it has won, our publications and our professional reputation over the last decade, are for us indicators of the progress we have made in our journey.

As lifelong learners, it seems premature and presumptuous to offer advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, but here’s one key learning we’d like to share: Entrepreneurship is a learning journey, we cannot be locked into fixed ideas or goals.

Prepare to be surprised with what you learn about yourself, your aspirations and your goals along the way, and make sure you choose your partners carefully to accommodate for how your learnings shape you.

To know more about Saathealth, visit our website!