eHealth Startup Cloudphysician Raises Funds To Fix Lack Of Critical Care Specialists

Cloudphysician, a telemedicine startup focused on adult critical care, has raised $4 Mn in Pre-Series A funding round from Elevar Equity. 

Founded by Dhruv Joshi and Dileep Raman, both of whom are ICU-specialist doctors, Cloudphysician aims to tackle the unavailability of skilled critical care specialists in remote locations in the country and elsewhere in the developing world.

Hospitals without critical care infrastructure can access Cloudphysician’s team of highly trained intensive care experts and proprietary ICU management cloud platform “RADAR” to manage critically ill patients that they otherwise couldn’t. 

Cloudphysician manages over 40 hospitals in 15 states in India and has treated more than 30,000 critically ill patients since 2017, including treating more than 5,000 Covid-19 patients. The ehealth startup claims to have helped client hospitals increase revenue by 50% and decrease mortality rate by 40%.

The startup will use the funds raised from Elevar Equity towards increasing its clients base in India and other developing regions, including some African countries. It employs over 100, more than half of whom are clinical staff, and the tech team makes up a majority of the remaining number.

“At Cloudphysician, we have intentionally created a solution that drops the barrier for adoption,” said Dhruv Joshi in an interview with Inc42. “About 70% of our clients are in Tier-II and Tier-III cities and towns,” he added.

When asked about how much more efficient the platform is when compared to locally deploying healthcare professionals on location, Joshi replied, “Using our technology, we are able to increase the efficiency and productivity of doctors by about four or five-fold currently. A doctor that would have been taking care of ten or fifteen patients can help take care of close to 50 patients on our platform.”

India has less than one doctor per 1,000 people, which is particularly low when compared to countries like China which has 2 physicians per population of 1,000, and Pakistan which has one doctor per 1,000 people.

According to Joshi, it will be very difficult to achieve higher doctor-patient ratios. Still, he believes that technology-enabled solutions can increase the ability of doctors to cope with the number of patients that need attention. “We wouldn’t even need a high doctor-patient ratio,” he remarked while speaking to Inc42.

According to an Inc42 Plus report, the Indian eHealth market is expected to be worth $10.6 Bn in 2025, growing at a CAGR of 39.6%, with telemedicine being the biggest contributor to the market size.

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