Bengaluru start-up provides ICU expertise to Ramanagara coronavirus hospital

A three-year-old remote medical support start-up will lend the services of its ICU specialists to the Ramanagara district hospital, designated to treat COVID-19 patients.

Though Ramanagara remains a green zone — meaning it has no COVID-19 cases so far — its only functioning hospital has been designated to treat coronavirus patients, just like every district hospital that has been reserved to handle the outbreak.

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“Since Ramanagara has no medical college, the 50-bedded taluk hospital was functioning as the district hospital. A separate 250-bedded hospital that was under construction has come to a standstill because of the lockdown,” said Dr Niranjan, district health officer, Ramanagara. The official also added that the administration has transformed the converted Kandaya Bhavan in Ramanagara into a COVID-19 hospital.

“If the government were to deploy specialists from other taluk hospitals, it would affect medical operations in those hospitals. We are therefore taking help from the start-up company, Cloudphysician, for ICU services,” Dr Niranjan said.

Remote ICU services

A tele-ICU start-up, Cloudphysician has a command centre in Mehkri Circle in north Bengaluru, where physicians, anaesthetists and intensivists monitor the live feed of the vitals of ICU patients from 18 hospitals across the country.

The company’s platform called Radar, which is loaded in a computer in the ICU, captures the images of monitors in the ICU such as the ones measuring the heartbeat, blood pressure and other parameters. The platform converts the images into data and uploads it to the cloud in real-time. The data is relayed to specialists in the command centre.

The company was founded by intensivists and pulmonologists Dr Dhruv Joshi and Dr Dileep Raman, who moved back from the US.

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“India doesn’t have ICU specialists,” Dr Joshi told DH. “This is more evident during the Covid-19 epidemic.” He said the company has installed Radar at Cytecare, MVJ and Aveksha Hospitals in Bengaluru, along with a few in Mysuru, Mandya and Hubballi.

While some machines in the ICU are directly connected to the Radar platform, others that cannot be connected have their images taken by a video camera, digitised with OCR software and then sent to the cloud.