Today I want to tell you the story behind Healthtech Pivot!

Aditya and I have been associated with hospitals and healthcare for more than 20 years, powering more than 700 operating rooms across the country with world-class equipment and continue to build, equip and maintain many more.

In our conversations with customers, we realized that while industry was moving from V1.0 to V2.0 and now V4.0, hospitals were not yet seriously considering technology, other than in clinical practice. Healthcare is all about care, and care is delivered through people. But people (other than doctors and surgeons) are the most under-rated cog in the healthcare wheel. A visit to any hospital is an eye-opener. Nurses bogged down by administrative work of maintaining patient papers or remembering the plethora of instructions that a visiting doctor gives out at each bedside or searching out patient’s old reports / case history. Biomedical engineers frantically trying to piece together movement of assets between departments or verifying purchase records from files. Medical helpers looking for wheel chairs / ventilators / some device long forgotten at some bedside perhaps. The cost of manual tracking seldom calculated accurately, the risks to patients is, almost always, never perceived.

The direction for us was clear; through Healthtech Pivot, we wanted to make a difference to these largely unsung healthcare workers, make their life a little easier, free them from the bother of multiple administrative bottlenecks and aid them in improving patient care through streamlined processes. We also understood that there is information there at every point that needs to be captured and turned into insight for delivering lower costs, better return on investment or improved efficiency in the process. That was the germ of an idea behind Healthtech Pivot – a pivot into better care through better data.

The idea for Pivot Smartflow, in fact, originated in a conversation with the Executive Director of a well-known hospital in Mumbai.  Every year, he said, they invested lakhs in replacing surgical instruments without any visibility on whether this was necessitated due to pilferage or wear and tear. The difficulty in tracking and accounting for this expensive inventory meant most hospitals have to write off these investments as operating expense rather than capitalizing it. Conversations with CSSD managers confirmed the stressful experience that all of them face vis-à-vis workflow of these items. CSSD managers summoned into Operating Rooms to receive a dressing down from a surgeon, mid procedure is common place and every hospital is struggling with rudimentary and ineffective solutions to solve these issues.

So started our journey with Pivot Smartflow, with a mindset to solve this problem, not just in India but world-wide.  An Indian-made world-class product specially designed in consultation with CSSD managers and accounting for the unique challenges of Indian healthcare.