THE LARGEST PROFESSIONAL LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM FOR THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

"Spend time in understanding industry requirements and pain points. Develop product in tandem with the industry, that will give the best and the most relevant feedback"

Abhinav Girdhar

With the industry of health conceding into an unpredictable hustle of competition and progression each day, the need for more and more young professionals diving into the field with and through knowledge has become imperative.

Founded in 2015, Bodhi Health Education Private Limited by Abhinav, CEO-Co-Founder and Shrutika Girdhar, CTO-Co-Founder, the venture provides AI-based solutions to improve the efficiency of human capital to healthcare providers. It helps the healthcare providers in talent screening of professionals and providing them with adaptive and customized in-service training.

Bodhi had early support from Duke University Accelerator Program and Innovations in Healthcare Network – founded by Duke Medicine, World Economic Forum, and McKinsey works with leading healthcare providers in India and South East Asia and has leading medical educators –international and Indian developing products to solve customer needs and challenges.

THE VISIONARIES

Abhinav Girdhar brings in 10+ years of healthcare consulting experience in India and the US. This has helped him understand healthcare models across the spectrum. He is passionate about start-ups and has been part of the start-up ecosystems since 2012. He holds an MBA from the National University of Singapore. He is the recipient of HM King of Thailand's Award at the Bangkok Business Challenge and NUS Student Achievement 2006.

Shrutika Girdhar heads technology and product development. Before joining Bodhi, she has worked for 7 years in the areas of enterprise mobility and process improvement in the telecom industry in India and the UK. Shrutika holds an MBA from SPJAIN, India and is a 2014 Start-up Leadership Program fellow.

In a conversation with The CEO Magazine, Abhinav talks about his venture, plans, working model, ethos, the corporate culture of the industry and more,

The CEO: What are the Differentiating Factors?

Abhinav: The key aspect, which differentiates Bodhi's products, is that these do not follow one-size fits all approach. Bodhi is the first to introduce the complete workforce efficiency solution integrating competency and psychometric assessments. The data-driven training platform follows the guidelines and practices in developing countries as compared to the global platforms.

The CEO: How do you work on your long-term relationship with your clients?

Abhinav: We are associated with Hospital Chains, Public Health Providers, and leading medical academic institutions. Our philosophy is to become long-term partners with our clients. This journey begins with understanding their pain points and key challenges, which are unique to each client. At Bodhi, we believe in a nimble approach to provide solutions to the clients, which would be a mix of stock solutions and customized offerings. Stick solutions allow fast deployment and cost-effectiveness.

Given that our clients have high stakes, building trust with them is key for us in this start-up stage. We start with low-risk pilots with our clients for them to be confident of our products and delivery capabilities. This helps us also understand the customization requirements.

The CEO: What is the business problem the company hopes to solve with its solutions and offerings?

Abhinav: Bodhi focuses on improving workforce efficiency. Healthcare providers lose 1% to 2.5% of their total revenue to bring a new hire up to speed. Conventional in-service training methods decrease the bottom line of hospital chains by 26%. This is largely because at scale it becomes extremely difficult to map competencies of the workforce to the job roles. Bodhi is working on solving these key problems using AI and simulation based solutions.

The CEO: What does innovation mean to you and your company?

Abhinav: To Bodhi, innovation means enabling access to cost-effective technology solutions to the last mile healthcare providers to improve their workforce efficiency. Our product team continuously strives to build solutions, which are effective, efficient, and most importantly suitable for low resource countries. As the venture is now growing, we have set up a separate team with a mandate to work on further innovative products and ideas, which can support our clients.

The CEO: What are the innovations that your company has brought into the industry?

Abhinav: Using the innovative Gamification solution, Bodhi is the first venture to bring in simulation learning to healthcare professionals especially nurses in India. The solution is not only developed but also implemented with different stakeholders. Leading private healthcare providers in India and South East Asia are using the solution for talent screening and in-service training. 

The CEO: Present your point of view on the role of innovation for the development of any company

Abhinav: Businesses have to innovate on multiple dimensions and think beyond the product innovation. It could be as simple yet powerful as innovating on communicating the venture value proposition to potential customers. Today when technology is evolving in leaps, even the Fortune 100 companies are taking serious note of innovation to ensure their relevance to business needs and client requirements. Disruption and innovation have become two words of the same coin. Agility and fast prototyping are now significant for all business processes today and much beyond the product development alone. 

The CEO: What are some of the biggest impediments to innovation in your organization or industry sector?

Abhinav: The healthcare industry globally stays categorized as an early adopter of innovative solutions. These range from complex imaging solutions, which have evolved collaboratively by the MedTech companies and the healthcare industry. Leading global healthcare providers have collaborated with incubators/accelerators to provide problem statements to healthcare start-ups who are working on building solutions for them. For Bodhi the greatest impediment currently the pace at which we create innovative solutions and have adequate proof of concepts opportunities, which will build confidence to scale certain solutions. 

The CEO: What technologies, business models, and trends will drive the biggest changes in your industry?

Abhinav: The Government and the policymakers have created a strong model to provide quality universal health coverage. Imaging technologies continue to evolve and become pivotal for disease diagnosis. Trained healthcare professionals will be key to the growth of the sector as this is the fundamental key to keep healthcare affordable. Technology penetration in this space will be essential for the long-term sustainability and self-reliance of this sector.

The CEO: What are the major Milestones and achievements of the company?

Abhinav: In terms of milestones, we have implemented the largest tech-based training platform for training of doctors and nurses at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi in August 2015 and International Financial Corporation, part of The World Bank Group for commercial pilots with their portfolio in 2017 listed us. In addition, we have expanded in South East Asia – Singapore, Indonesia, and Myanmar in 2018.

We received the Government of Maharashtra & NASSCOM innovative start-up award 2019, Top 8 finalists at MIT Solve 2018, Selected at Innovations in Healthcare network 2015 founded by Duke Medicine, McKinsey & Co, and World Economic Forum, 2015 and others

Bodhi Health Education Pvt. Ltd. plans to launch augmented reality education and training products for healthcare professionals and building data sets for artificial intelligence based products. They are in the future looking to integrate a suite of solutions for hospital chains to improve workforce efficiency backed by artificial intelligence and machine language algorithms and data-driven peer-to-peer learning and career development platform for healthcare professionals.