NRI veNtuRe empoweRs caNceR patIeNts
The Navya Network gave 99% concurrence with the experts of Tata Hospital, i.e. in 99% cases, Navya gave the same opinion as the hospital experts.
London celebrated Yoga Day with aplomb. The day began early at the High Commission India (HCI) with the lighting of lamps in front of the Mahatma Gandhi statue in the Gandhi Hall and a video message from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s goodwill message was also displayed. Indian high commissioner Rajan Mathai and Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh joined a meditation and yoga class led by the British Wheel of Yoga (BWY).
From the HCI the group walked over to Waterloo Bridge to the event hosted by HCI and India Tourism at Bernie Spain Gardens, Southbank. Swami Kailasananda, Yoga Acharya, talked about “Universal Message of Yoga” and Satish Kumar, ecologist and philosopher lectured on “Yoga, the Way of Life”.
On Tuesday, 23 June, Lord Bilimoria, Independent Crossbench Peer, founder and chairman of Cobra Beer, brought the First Annual UN International Yoga Day Celebrations to the House of Lords. MPs and Peers took part in the event.
At the event, Lord Bilimoria said, “Over the past two and a half decades the world has increasingly been looking to India as an emerging global economic superpower. However, India’s influence on the world has also been through its amazing soft power, with yoga being a shining example. Today yoga is rapidly gaining in popularity around the world for its recognised benefits for wellbeing and mindfulness… I am delighted that we were able to celebrate International Yoga Day in the Houses of Parliament in London.”
At a time when cancer is one of the leading killers globally, a young woman has set out to build a sustainable venture to empower cancer patients with data-backed findings and expert opinions to ensure the “best-possible” line of treatment. Gitika Srivastava, a 35-year old MIT graduate and the mother of a pre-schooler, has already associated her venture, Navya Network, with some of the prominent names including Harvard Business School, and Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai, which is a leading tertiary cancer care provider.
“Navya provides patients and physicians with the tools to make expert treatment decisions for complex medical conditions. Navya has accurately made over 1,000 expert treatment decisions in oncology,” claims the homepage of navyanetwork. com.
“Each cancer case is different. The process involved in deciding every minute course of treatment is complex. Often, patients and their family members are left wondering if they are taking the best decisions about the line of treatment. They don’t know if they are asking the right questions. A glance at the internet confounds them further due to the massive amount of information which is not research-backed most of the times,” said Gitika, while talking about the inspiration behind the venture.
“My family and I went through all those nervewracking moments from 2007. But fortunately, we had access to the best medical experts across the world. I was left wondering about those who were not so privi- leged. That is when Navya’s co-founder, Dr Naresh Ramarajan and I, decided to start the venture,” she said.
In India, the number of cancer patients is on the rise. Every year, over one million new cancer cases are found. More cases are reported in urban India as compared to rural India. But the number of specialist doctors to treat cancer is woefully short, especially in mid-sized towns. Also, access to quality treatment is a major hurdle. There is a tremendous lack of information about the global guidelines in cancer treatment.
On this background, Navya Network quickly attained popularity not just in India, but in many other South Asian and African countries. The website navyanetwork. com has 2,200 registered patients since May 2014 when it was first launched. Apart from patients, the web service has been used by doctors too. Many from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Dubai, Kuwait, Russia, Malaysia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nairobi, South Africa, Australia, United States of America, Fiji, and Russia have consulted the website.
The service is available for Rs 5,000 per Indian patient and $100 for foreign patients. Indians who live below the poverty line can avail the service for free. Till recently, the helpline focused mainly on patients of breast cancer. Last month, the service was widened to offer expertise to all types of cancers.
“This service will help reduce the flow of patients to big tertiary care centres. Here, at the Tata Memorial Hospital alone, we receive 60,000 registrations (of cancer patients) every year. Patients come from not just different corners of India, but from parts of the world too. Many come for a second opinion. This service will help reduce the burden on the centre, and at the same time, provide personalised expert opinion to the patients,” said Dr Rajendra Badwe, director of Tata Memorial Centre.
Appreciating the venture, he further added, “Navya Network brings in uniformity of care. A synoptic history is brought to the expert. It gives global guidelines and reviews about what is happening all over the world regarding cancer treatment. Moreover, it includes patients’ choices too.”
Patients and care-givers can save valuable time and money used for commuting to large tertiary centres. They can get the same personalised expert advice at the click of the mouse.
Gitika, Dr Naresh and their team of analysts and technologists have spent years in creating a data-backed system, which can turn qualitative data into quantitative data that can be manipulated.
“We aren’t about online expertise. We are about sound scientific system that patients can use. I don’t know any other clinical systems that have been validated in this rigorous way,” Gitika said.
“It was a huge undertaking. A lot of people never thought this was possible. It was intelligent and tedious work, which required marriage between technology, clinical knowledge and interest to do it,” she said.
“Dr Gupta from Tata Memorial Hospital once said to me, ‘you are trying to get the machine to think the way a doctor does’. But thanks to their trust in me, it worked. We had leading experts in medicine and in technology to do this cross between technology and medicine,” she added.
The high point of success came when the system designed by Navya gave 99% concurrence with the experts of Tata Hospital. This means, in 99% cases, the evidence-backed system of Navya Network gave the same opinion as the experts of Tata Hospital.
It had taken the Navya team, based in Bangalore and in Boston, over two years of rigorous work to create this system. Today, the network owns two patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark office for their pioneering search engines — one for the “treatment related quantitative decision engine” and the other for their “treatment decision engine with applicability measure”.
“Initially, it was depressing because it was taking a very long time to build the system and populate it with data. We were learning, and then learning that that wasn’t the most efficient way of doing it. It was a very slow organic growth. We started building the system in May 2011 and by 2013, it was pretty usable. We also went through global guidelines and included them in our system,” Gitika said.
Without giving out any figures on the net worth of the company, she says the venture is now stable and sustainable, and has strong assets. “The operational costs are being met,” she said.
“Our system is backed by a strong patent portfolio. We have followed a painfully slow process of undergoing clinical trials to make sure that our system takes good decisions like expert doctors take today. Initially, we were expert-dependent. Now we are system-enabled too,” she said.
Gitika and Dr Naresh were the initial investors in Navya Network. Over a period, they got investment from like-minded people like Sasha Mirchandani, Gautam Shewakramani.
Today, Gitika thanks the investors, the doctors at Tata Memorial Hospital, her ecosystem and network in Boston, and her family for the success.
She now plans to branch out to other verticals aiming at streams other than oncology. “Now, the underlying principles are scalable. Over this year, we hope to have systems which physicians can use,” she said.
“They got back to me within hours after I uploaded my 10-year-old son’s information. Today, thanks to Navya and Tata Hospital, my son is undergoing proper treatment for his cancer,” said Dinesh Kumar, a working professional from Bangalore.
Patients and care-givers can save valuable time and money used for commuting to large tertiary centres. They can get the same personalised expert advice at the click of the mouse.