MediGuru Strategy

We are a software company that built a telemedicine solution for mid to large hospitals. You might wonder as to why one more telemedicine software? Why now? What differentiates us from the 100s of other vendors already there? Allow me to share our strategy and walk you through our product journey.

I have always wanted to write about this journey. Always wanted to talk about why us and why now and what do we do that differentiates us. Our genesis starts with CloudiX Inc. CloudiX is a Microsoft Azure Gold Partner and has been involved in building patient engagement and digital engagement solutions for a variety of healthcare clients (Vera Whole Health, LivaNova, Vimly etc.,).  We even dabbled in a Class-3 embedded medical device and build an entire patient and clinician app for interfacing with the device. We are well versed in what it means to build secure, compliant solutions for healthcare clients as well as the processes to follow – SOC audits, Pen Testing, FDA approvals, documentation, testing methodology, development methodology etc.,

After the advent of COVID-19, telehealth and specifically virtual consultations became a necessity. Primary care centers and hospitals were closed and amidst the rolling lockdowns, patients were afraid to step out of their houses and were reluctant to travel for in-person visits. There was a genuine need to implement a virtual first practice. Close to 80% of all appointment requests and consultations at our clients were virtual! Our clients were struggling to adopt to the virtual first practice and were trying to force fit stop gap telehealth solutions using readily available commercial video communication platforms. This led to business sacrifices in the type of care and empathy to patients as well as adoption challenges within the care teams. There were genuine concerns on the security, privacy, and compliance aspects as well. In addition, the tactical virtual care experience seemed like a band-aid and the users were stuck in two separate systems (one for virtual and one for in-person visits).

We saw an opportunity to build a seamless experience that provided an integrated virtual care that was simple and easy to use with the same degree of in-person experience and was life-like. We did not want to build it as a hard to customize SaaS platform. These platforms that mushroomed are very good for solo practices or clinics with less than 5 person care team staff. We did not want to build a marketplace, where we onboard providers and sell their services. We truly opted to build a solution that would not compete with the clinical workflows within healthcare systems, nor the patient experience they offered. We knew that the experience had to be simple, easy to use, healthcare first and virtual next and ensure the care team experience and administration as the fundamental problem to solve.

Our experience working with clients and understanding their business needs, dictated our philosophy to design and co-develop our solution as components that can be branded, customized, and integrated with them. By building these as cloud-based components that can be deployed in a customer’s tenant and partnering with Dolby.io and using their high performance, high fidelity and high clarity video and audio services, we brought MediGuru to life. We innovated on advanced clinical workflows like (1) Patient waiting room, (2) Medical Assistants (3) Care Team Dashboard, (4) Streamlined Provider experience, (5) Dynamic, auto-expiring virtual rooms, (6) Virtual Scribe, (7) Charting and EMR integration.  All these are shipping in our solution as of today.

In the coming months, our innovation will lead to more advanced clinical workflows like e-triage, symptom checker, medical assistant bots, automated scheduling assistants, patient journey alerts, health device integrations, remote monitoring etc.,

As I said at the start – we are a telemedicine platform. Even post-COVID, 35% of all consultations are expected to be virtual. Our motivation was to ensure our platform will serve as a strategic long-term solution for our clients’ virtual care needs. We want to innovate and bring to market advanced clinical workflows that will allow our clients to not only partner but co-develop with us and ensure our platform forms the fulcrum of their Digital Front Door strategy.

This is our strategy. This is our journey. Our goal is to help you to implement a strategic long-term telemedicine solution that forms the cornerstone of your virtual care practice.

There are lots of good solutions out there. But if you have chosen an approach that was tactical and involved force fitting a generic video/ audio communication platform, please check out our Customization calculator. If you have a fully functional development team that operates in a truly agile manner, you might be able to build all the innovation and incorporate into your virtual care. But a custom solution takes time and effort. We have done this exercise for a variety of our clients. Our research shows you might need more than 8+ months of multiple dedicated application engineering pods to bring a custom solution to life. And the cost could be upward of 1Million USD.

To prove to you that our solution works and to de-risk the effort and commitment on your end, we launched a Jumpstart program. With no software commitment from you, at $0 cost to you, we can setup a demo sandbox environment for you. Allow us to showcase our platform and build this custom experience. Want to explore more? – just hit us at sales@mediguru.io and we can plan for the next steps (for qualified customers).

About the Author: Siva Nagalingam is the founder and CEO of MediGuru. With 25 years of industry experience, he is the co-founder and CEO of CloudiX Inc. A serial entrepreneur, he is passionate about healthcare and is constantly looking to build solutions that can offer better and affordable care outcomes. Siva is based out of Seattle, WA and can be reached at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivakumar-nagalingam-a186944/