Anuruddh Mishra was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 27 following a blood test. He had pain in his fingers, and the prognosis was quite scary as he even lost the ability to walk. A few months later, he undertook another test and the results showed the pain was largely due to low Vitamin D and high uric acid levels.
Mishra conducted research and decided to set up a healthcare tech startup that would leverage technology to provide personalised health cards to people, with prevention being the first line of defence against any future diseases, and medicine being the last line of defence.
An IIT Varanasi graduate, Mishra teamed up with Anand Rao, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, to start Get Beyond Health in August 2022. The Bengaluru-based startup aims to provide an accurate health report card for people, especially Indians, with parameters that are more attuned to the characteristics of population of the country.
Solving healthcare for Indians
According to Mishra, the conventional lipid profile test to find out cholesterol level of human beings is not very accurate, but apolipoprotein B test gives the right indicator. He says that many laboratory indicators are based on randomised tests done on non-Indian origin individuals, and this may not provide an accurate diagnosis.
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The startup started to collect a vast amount of medical and healthcare data from multiple sources to provide a more accurate assessment of an individual.
“We started thinking about what Indian people need, and for that we collected the right set of data,” says Mishra.
The goal was to collect various data points like blood biomarker and bio age and create a personalised scorecard for individuals. In addition to this, Get Beyond Health realised that to provide this, they need to deploy technology.
It is here the healthcare startup started building algorithms, which can provide the score based on the input data. In addition, it also created several large language models (LLM) to process all the data to provide a more accurate picture.
The big challenge in all this is that people Google for information based on certain health conditions, but this may not be the best route as Mishra says “Google can provide a lot of information but no context.”
How it works?
Once the users upload their laboratory report on the platform, it provides an in-depth health scorecard for the individuals based on various parameters like age, family history, lifestyle, disease condition, etc. Following this, it provides personalised consultation and recommendation.
“Once the health card is out, we tell them what the areas they should be working on,” says Mishra.
He gives the example of an individual who had very erratic eating habits and a deep diagnosis revealed that it was largely due to stress.
This startup, after numerous iterations, has come out with a new platform called August, which it terms personalised health coach where the user can type in any kind of health query and it claims that they will provide the relevant information.
Further, this startup can connect the users to the relevant health professionals be it nutritionists, or doctors for further consultation.
Get Beyond Health says its USP is the way it has leveraged technology to give out a fully automated health scorecard. Here the user can put their query, blood report or even an image and then their LLM model will come out with the responses in almost no time.
“The idea being how does one talk to their own health data and get the right context,” adds Anand Rao. He further says that the LLM models are able to provide context through analysis and provide the recommendation. This allows it to build a personalised health plan.
Mishra points out that whatever is recommended by Get Beyond Health is based on science and there is a lot of research associated with it. This startup has got both technologists and doctors on its team. As of now, the team size is around 12 people.
Get Beyond Health started testing out its products in various cohorts like biohackers, fitness enthusiasts, running groups, etc. The founders claim that the early results have been encouraging and they have provided these services to a couple of thousand people.
The startup’s health test is now commercially available as the August platform. The aim is to onboard a large number of organisations onto this platform. Their target is to have 10,000 users and over 200,000 queries on their platform.
The angel funded startup is now ready to scale as it has created a tech platform that automates many processes in terms of providing individualised health card and recommendations. Get Beyond Health does not come under any defined market segment as it connects to multiple players in the healthcare market. Though the India Brand Equity Foundation says the e-health market in India is expected to reach $10.6 billion by 2025.
Mishra strongly believes that the core ethos of Get Beyond Heath is prevention through behaviour, exercise, nutrition, and supplements rather than being a platform that provides a cure.
Edited by Megha Reddy
