With conversations around digital health growing louder, Hyderabad-based Ekincare CEO Kiran Kalakuntla sat down to talk about something he believes India can no longer postpone: making sense of its health data. In a candid chat with CE, Kiran shared why building a data-driven healthcare future is urgent, and how standardisation, strong privacy safeguards and artificial intelligence could change the way Indians experience care.
Kiran began by pointing to a basic gap in the system. “This is something that we have been trying to educate for a really long time because from a health care data perspective, today there is no health data standardisation when it comes to India. In US companies, there is a health exchange where any provider who is trying to connect with that health exchange or any payer has to follow the standards of how they store the medical data, whereas in India, there is no medical data standardisation. Now, if I go to three different hospitals and get the same health checkup done, three different hospitals give me three ways of representing that same health care data, and therefore, I end up comparing apples to oranges. For India to actually start using health care data, the first thing we need to do is standardise the data,” he said, adding, “Once we standardise it, the benefit of health data is that it becomes a relative model. Just like how social media personalises the wall when we scroll and gives more relevant feed, health care data can improve our chances of getting healthier by offering what is truly relevant to each of us.”
Speaking about infrastructure, Kiran noted that India has already taken steps. “India is already on that path. The government has implemented the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) stack, and ABHA IDs are now like Aadhaar IDs. If I enter an ABHA ID, I can pull that individual’s medical data. ABDM is a central government repository where hospitals can fetch a person’s information and, after understanding and generating data about that episode, push it back into ABDM to consolidate records over time. At Ekincare, we have been doing this for almost seven years. However, the problem is that ABHA and ABDM are storing records, not data,” he expresses.
Privacy, he admitted, is a genuine concern. “If you think about an individual’s data, today, everybody is sharing on social media and their location, and all of that is still okay. However, every individual has sensitivity towards financial data and healthcare data, and in fact, healthcare data is more sensitive than financial data because there is a lot more personal stuff that gets revealed. Therefore, we store and protect this information by separating it into two parts: personally identifiable information (PII) and cumulative anonymised information. PII such as my name, phone number, or mail ID is stored separately. In contrast, my medical history is stored separately after opt-in consent during onboarding, and both are protected with AES 256-bit encryption to ensure safety, security, and privacy,” Kiran noted.
Talking about the long-term vision of Ekincare, Kiran shared, “We are one of the largest corporate benefits platforms, and we have been extremely blessed to grow, as we today manage more than 200 enterprises and close to around one and a half million employees’ health through our platform, from awareness, affordability and accessibility. We want to continue this journey, and our larger goal is to make India Inc. healthier by reducing productivity lost because of sick leaves.”