When a health care provider prescribes you a drugs, the dosing timing and period generally is a little complicated, particularly in the event you’ve misplaced a prescription or unintentionally forgot to take a capsule. These are a few of the commonest causes of poor adherence that may have dramatic negative effects if sufferers have power issues corresponding to diabetes or coronary heart illness. That’s the place Karma Dost is available in, a smartphone app that prompts you to take your medicines on time.
“For a long time, the traditional model has been that someone reminds us to take the medicine and if they forget… I forget too. We took up that topic and said what if we recreate that environment in a digital-first environment,” Amit Choudhary, co-founder and CEO of Dawa Dost, describes the concept behind the Karma Dost app.
Medication adherence in well being care is an under-discussed and sometimes missed matter. In truth, based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, half of Americans with power ailments cease taking medicines inside a yr of their preliminary prescription. In India, though there isn’t a scientific knowledge accessible, specialists say that the adherence fee is way beneath 10 per cent which is at a low degree.
Future updates will see the flexibility to digitize prescriptions by scanning an image utilizing the telephone’s digital camera. (Image credit score: Dawa Friend)
“Most people in India take the medicine for the first three days and then stop the 5-day course midway because they are feeling better,” he mentioned. A brand new schedule and lack of knowledge about taking remedy (eg some tablets could also be taken earlier than meals and others could also be taken twice a day).
The idea of a medicine-reminder app like Karma Dost is easy: let your smartphone remind you when to take your physician’s prescribed remedy with out the assistance of a member of the family and ensure the therapy plan is adopted. The app allows you to create a listing of your medicines by importing the prescription or simply typing the title of the medication. You can then schedule notifications in your telephone when it is time to take them precisely as scheduled by selecting the variety of days, weeks or months and setting a particular time of day based mostly on the remedy and your situation can go. is being handled for. Repeat this for any drugs you’re taking. You can point out the type of the drug – pill or capsule by its shade and measurement, which makes it simple for customers so as to add a drugs if they can not keep in mind the title of the capsule.
Once you’ve got arrange a capsule reminder, you’ll be able to customise the way you need notifications delivered by way of the app as a name or textual content message. When you obtain an in-app notification or a reminder name, that is an indicator that you’ve taken a drugs or missed a dose. Choudhary says that 80 to 85 % of customers utilizing the app have opted to obtain a capsule reminder within the type of a name. “On an average, between 8 am and 9:30 am, which is morning hours per medicine, we are making 70,000 to 75,000 calls a day,” he mentioned.
Out of the overall person base, a serious section of Karma Dost app customers are aged. (Image credit score: Dawa Friend)
The app, which went stay final yr and is barely accessible on Android-based smartphones, at the moment has over 75,000 month-to-month lively customers and is rising. Karma Dost app has no advertisements or premium options that you have to pay to unlock. This is a free app, and Choudhary has no intention of turning Karma Dost right into a “service”, a enterprise mannequin adopted by many within the trade to extend the person base.
But what makes Karma Dost completely different from different medicine-reminder apps is the Karma function and therefore the title Karma Dost. If a person takes the medication on time, corresponding to for the following seven days, they earn KD cash which can be utilized for social work corresponding to planting bushes, sponsoring a lady kid’s training for a day or feeding a cow. Is.
The latest launch of a brand new Medicines device within the Health app on iPhone by Apple has once more targeted on non-compliance of medicines and the way huge the issue is on a world scale. While Choudhary welcomed Apple’s acknowledgment of drug non-compliance and fixing the issue in its personal distinctive method, he mentioned that Karma Dost is a greater resolution designed protecting one billion Indian customers in thoughts. Some might query the effectiveness of medication-reminder apps and pill-pack companies, however Choudhary claims that adherence charges amongst Karma Dost customers have truly improved by 40 to 50 %.
Chowdhary, who co-founded the startup Dawa Dost with Yash Harlalka and Anirudh Batwara in 2018, is an omnichannel pharmacy retail chain that goals to unravel India’s huge well being issues by offering medicines at reasonably priced charges. The Jaipur-based startup primarily focuses on Tier-2 and three cities and in addition owns platforms like Medwiki which supplies short-form movies on treatments and Karma Dost.
Choudhary, who has labored with FMCG big Procter & Gamble and e-commerce buying platform Snapdeal up to now, says the Karma Dost app will proceed to enhance by way of new options and experiences. For instance, within the coming weeks, the corporate plans to launch a brand new function the place you’ll be able to obtain the app to your mother and father, digitize the pamphlets and go away their quantity, and the WhatsApp chatbot Will deal with the remaining. This will make the reminder function easy however with out truly downloading the app to your telephone.
It additionally plans so as to add an improved voice-recognition function constructed into the app that the corporate is at the moment constructing and updates shall be launched within the coming months. “In the previous, we’ve got tried to construct a voice search functionality, however the problem is that drug names in India are so advanced that even probably the most educated battle to pronounce them appropriately. So machine studying fashions of any variety successfully fail as a result of they require a sure diploma of enter to attain what you are saying,” he mentioned.
Karma Dost is end-to-end encrypted, which implies the corporate can not learn or in any other case entry the info. Choudhary acknowledges that well being care knowledge is vital and protecting knowledge safe is essential to defending affected person privateness. The app will get two-factor authentication function, which provides an additional layer of safety to the authentication course of, making it tougher for attackers to realize entry to an individual’s medical historical past.
With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
