Stasis Labs was founded in 2015 with a vision to create the most accessible healthcare technology, where every patient treated enables Stasis to deliver better care to more people. With aggressive plans of leading Indian healthcare into the digital age, Stasis has designed a remote patient monitoring solution that provides high resolution, ICU-grade monitoring to all areas of the hospital, throughout the patient care pathway. The system significantly improves patient outcomes by providing clinicians with actionable insights to make accurate clinical decisions in a timely manner. With Stasis, healthcare providers can treat more patients with available resources, boost revenues while optimising costs, improve patient care, and provide a superlative experience to patients.
Currently, the Stasis patient monitoring solution is being used across 20 hospitals including Fortis, Ramaiah Hospitals, Columbia Asia, HCG, and Cloudnine in India, with more than 500 doctors using the Stasis App to remotely monitor their patients. Stasis completed two key usability studies funded by the World Bank Group through the TechEmerge program in 2017 and has expanded into key metros in south and west India.
In 2016, Stasis Labs raised $5 million in its seed investment round led by RTP-Healthcare Ventures. The round also saw participation from Wonder Ventures, Techstars Ventures, among others. In 2018, Stasis Labs aims to expand its presence across India, including Tier 2 markets and has plans to enter the home healthcare segment as well.
In an email interaction with TNM, Dr. Roheet Rao, Vice President-Sales, elaborated on the Stasis journey so far, benefits of using this technology for patients and hospitals, expansion plans among other things.
Here are excerpts:
About Stasis and their journey since inception
Stasis was founded with a vision to make proactive healthcare accessible, affordable, and universal. Inspired by a personal experience, co-founder and CEO Dinesh Seemakurty along with Michael Maylahn launched Stasis Labs in Los Angeles in 2015. Lack of adequate monitoring in all areas of the hospital, with a dependency on nurses to manually monitor all patients, in a scenario of skewed nurse-patient ratios can be detrimental to patient safety and result in poor clinical outcomes. Stasis is trying to bridge this gap with a continuous remote patient monitoring system that measures six core vital signs, deploys predictive AI at the bedside and provides actionable insights to clinicians anytime, and anywhere.
The design of the bedside Stasis Monitor is a paradigm shift in patient monitoring where traditional waveforms and numbers have been replaced by easily interpretable colour-based icons to relieve patient/family bedside anxiety that results from traditional vitals monitors. It enhances the patient experience of monitoring and improves patient management through its intuitive Stasis Tablet application that serves as a centralised digital patient case sheet. Through the Stasis App, doctors are able to remotely manage vulnerable patients on their smartphones with real-time vitals and high-resolution long-term trends.
Benefits of this technology for hospitals and patients
In India, less than 20% of beds outside the ICU are closely monitored, with close monitoring and access to technology being restricted to ICU beds. Monitoring outside the ICU is still a manual process with nurses spending nearly 15% of their time collecting and documenting vitals. According to studies, up to 75% of hospital deaths occur in unmonitored settings outside of the ICU. With Stasis, hospitals can automate the collection and documentation of vitals to improve nurse productivity, so that nurses can focus on core patient care activities.
Further, 20-30% of patients in the ICU are only there for close monitoring without the need for 1:1 nursing or interventional care. Stasis increases clinician confidence in out-of-ICU monitoring thereby increasing effective utilisation of ICU resources and patient throughput in ICUs. It also helps optimise lengths of stay in non-ICU areas by providing clinicians with high-resolution data of the patient's condition to make data-driven clinical decisions across the patient care pathway. This enables hospitals to improve the operational efficiency and optimise cost of care delivery.
The Stasis Smart Monitoring Solution measures six key vital signs and puts powerful long-term trends of the patient's condition on clinicians’ smartphones. Doctors can access this data readily through the Stasis app to identify patient deterioration in real-time and intervene in a timely manner. Smart Alerts powered by proprietary Stasis AI adds an additional layer of monitoring to identify patient deterioration proactively. Stasis not only helps in enhancing patient care but also optimises hospital costs and further boosts revenue.
Adoption of remote monitoring technology in the global markets
Continuous monitoring technology is actively being used in mature markets across the world such as the US, UK and Europe where more than 50% of beds have access to this technology. The global patient monitoring devices market was valued at $21.13 billion in 2016 and is estimated to reach $32.43 billion by 2023, registering a CAGR of 6.2% from 2017 to 2023. The global patient monitoring devices market is driven by increase in the geriatric population, growth in the prevalence of patients suffering from different lifestyle diseases, and rise in the adoption rate of remote patient monitoring devices. The market has benefited from the demand to move to a more wireless and streamlined operation both within major health facilities and in the home treatment markets.
Proactive care for the future of patient management can only be achieved with technology
The healthcare landscape is changing from reaction to anticipation. Today, technology-enabled proactive care is helping hospitals prevent patient deterioration through early detection and timely intervention. Not only does proactive healthcare improve patient safety and clinical outcomes, it also reduces patient bills by avoiding unnecessary ICU admissions, reducing ICU re-admission, and avoiding longer hospital stays. Technology that provides AI/ML in clinical practice, wearable devices and big data analytics for clinical decision-making, will ensure standardisation of healthcare outcomes and significantly improve patient care.
Remote patient monitoring is going to change the design of hospitals and care delivery models
ICUs are the only place in hospitals where a patient is under continuous monitoring. Once the patient is out of the ICU, manual monitoring is done by nurses at an interval of 4-8 hours. With a highly skewed patient to nursing staff ratio in India, this time interval could be even longer, leading to undesirable complications. Continuous remote patient monitoring helps in bridging this gap by providing timely intervention to vulnerable patients outside the ICU. Remote patient monitoring also allows for clinical oversight for home healthcare with IoT and AI delivering care across new frontiers in a more effective manner.
Future expansion plans and challenges ahead
Currently, we have sales and customer service teams in Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Calicut. Before the end of 2018, we expect to have teams in place to manage clients in Cochin and Mumbai as well. Stasis is also looking at engaging with distribution partners in 2019 to explore key tier 2 markets such as Pune, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Thiruvananthapuram, Vizag. In 2019, we are also looking to enter the home healthcare segment to provide remote patient monitoring for home healthcare providers.
The main challenge for the industry would be to create higher value for everyone at lower costs, in a market where the volume of demand will drive economies of scale. Only those healthcare players that can balance cost versus quality will survive and thrive.