Yostra labs Archives - InnoHEALTH magazine

The Path to Healing: Innovations in Podiatry

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:30:00 +0000

In this episode of InnoHEALTH Magazine’s podcast, we are honoured to share the remarkable journey of Dr. Sanjay Sharma, whose contributions to the field of podiatry are both inspiring and transformative. Dr. Sharma, who holds a master’s degree in surgery and a Ph.D. in podiatry from the University of Arizona, is a leading figure in the realm of foot care, particularly in the management of diabetic foot conditions.

As the Executive Director of Apta Healthcare and the founder of Yostra Labs, Dr. Sharma has played a pivotal role in advancing podiatric medicine. His innovative approach and dedication to improving patient outcomes have earned him the prestigious Technology Pioneer Award, underscoring his significant impact on healthcare innovation.

Understanding Podiatry

In the realm of healthcare, certain fields often go unnoticed despite their critical importance. One such domain is podiatric surgery, a specialized branch dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of foot and ankle conditions. Within this field, innovation plays a pivotal role in transforming lives, particularly in addressing issues like diabetic foot complications, sports injuries, and degenerative conditions. Dr. Sanjay Sharma, a leading podiatric surgeon with a wealth of experience, sheds light on the journey of innovation in this crucial area of healthcare.

At the forefront of Dr. Sharma’s work lies the urgent need to tackle diabetic foot conditions, a pressing concern in countries like India where diabetes prevalence is high. With over two decades of experience, Dr. Sharma emphasizes the significance of early intervention in preventing diabetic foot ulcers and subsequent amputations. Every 20 seconds, a limb is amputated due to diabetes, a statistic that underscores the critical need for early intervention.

Innovative Diagnostic Devices

Dr. Sharma’s pioneering efforts include the development of innovative diagnostic devices like NeuroTouch, which enables early detection of diabetic peripheral neuropathy, a common precursor to foot ulcers. NeuroTouch, a multi-parameter diabetic peripheral neuropathy diagnostic device, helps in early diagnosis, potentially preventing foot ulcers and subsequent amputations.

Overcoming Challenges

The road to innovation is not without its challenges. Dr. Sharma recounts the initial resistance faced from healthcare professionals in adopting new technologies and practices. Overcoming skepticism and fostering awareness became paramount in driving acceptance and implementation of novel approaches to foot care. Through perseverance and education, Dr. Sharma and his team have succeeded in shifting paradigms, leading to greater recognition of the importance of foot health in overall well-being.

Therapeutic Interventions and Surgical Advancements

Beyond diagnostics, Dr. Sharma’s work extends to therapeutic interventions and surgical advancements. Collaborating with Yostra Labs, he has contributed to the development of dynamically self-offloading footwear, tailored to address the specific needs of patients with diabetic foot complications. Additionally, innovations like VELOX, a warm oxygen therapy device for chronic ulcers, offer promising avenues for enhancing wound healing and reducing the burden of non-healing wounds.

The Role of Regenerative Medicine

Regenerative medicine is another area where Dr. Sharma has made significant contributions. Using adipose tissue extracted from the patient, his team has developed methods to accelerate the healing of chronic ulcers, reducing healing times from 12-20 weeks to as little as 5 weeks.

Sports Medicine and Preventive Measures

In the realm of sports medicine, podiatric surgeons like Dr. Sharma play a crucial role in addressing foot and ankle injuries prevalent among athletes. From ankle sprains to plantar fasciitis, these professionals employ a range of techniques, including minimally invasive surgeries and regenerative medicine, to facilitate faster recovery and return to activity. Dr. Sharma underscores the significance of preventive measures in maintaining foot health. From appropriate footwear selection to biomechanical assessments, proactive strategies can mitigate the risk of common foot ailments and degenerative conditions like osteoarthritis. By emphasizing the importance of foot care in overall health, Dr. Sharma advocates for a holistic approach to wellness.

The Importance of Appropriate Footwear

Dr. Sharma emphasized the critical role of appropriate footwear in preventing foot problems. Incorrect footwear can lead to various issues, including pain in the heel, forefoot, and even impact the knees, spine, and posture. Just as individuals require customized glasses for specific vision problems, they also need personalized footwear solutions to address their unique foot conditions.

The journey of innovation in podiatric surgery represents a beacon of hope for millions affected by foot and ankle conditions worldwide. Through a combination of technological advancements, clinical expertise, and patient-centred care, pioneers like Dr. Sanjay Sharma are revolutionising the landscape of foot health. As awareness grows and barriers are overcome, the path to healing becomes clearer, offering promise for a future where foot ailments are not just treated but prevented altogether.

The post The Path to Healing: Innovations in Podiatry appeared first on InnoHEALTH magazine.

New Age Solutions for Diabetic Care

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 10:47:37 +0000

Diabetes may not have a medically approved cure yet, but it sure can be turned a few knobs down with a well-balanced diet, regular exercise, and medication. Of course, one should follow a doctor’s advice for a lifestyle change. In the real world though, you look longingly at those French fries and convince yourself a few wouldn’t harm. Or you hit the snooze button and tell yourself, I will go for that long run tomorrow. And on and on you go, till your next visit to the Principal’s office, aka your doctor, where you hope miraculously for an improved report card. You are not alone my friend. Sticking to a regime requires discipline or an occasional reminder from your wellwishers (if you were me). A sight towards your goal and how far you have come in conquering it help matters further. Thankfully, plenty of new-age start-ups are here to make diabetes management and lifestyle changes easier.

Take for instance Life In Control and Wellthy Therapeutics. These digital platforms connect patients with doctors and coaches and provide personalized care in terms of diet and exercise plan. Users can create long-term health goals, follow-up daily tasks and keep tabs on their health profile including HbA1C and glucose levels, track medicines intake and understand how their daily routine affect these measures. These start-ups also give doctors the flexibility of reaching out to patients outside their clinical hours as well as to create and coach them on their personalized care plans. In the language of numbers, Life In Control has over 100 doctors on the platform and appears to have helped over a lakh patient with their app. Wellthy Therapeutics took the approach of a pilot program with diabetic patients and claims to have helped reduce both HbA1C levels by a little over 1% and an average weight reduction of 3.4 kgs over 16 weeks. It also got an endorsement by Asia’s largest diabetes association, Research Society for the Study of Diabetes in India. Both the apps are available for download on Android and iOS platforms.

Adding to the growing list of startups are those that detect blood glucose and connect directly to your smartphone. BioSense SYNC, for instance, is a compact Glucometer with Bluetooth connectivity to a user’s phone. It provides a detailed analysis of blood sugar data collected over a number of days. Similar to other diabetes management apps, a user can map their glucose data with their eating and exercising habits. Taking these interventions a step further, the start-up BeatO not only provides a smartphone Glucometer but also a range of diabetic friendly food products to munch upon. Patients can order medicines, sync their fitness devices and count calories on food items consumed. As of today, BeatO has served more than 25000 customers with a daily user add-on of 75-100. Most of these diabetes management apps can instantly connect a patient to a diabetic coach in case the sugar levels are off, and alert the patient’s family as well on concerning trends.

Complimenting these health management gurus, patients are also likely to benefit if there were devices providing at home diagnosis for diabetic complications, such as neuropathy, kidney malfunction or diabetic retinopathy. Scintiglo by Cutting Edge Medical Devices, Anupath by PathShodh and Sparsha by Yostra Labs have created Point of Care (PoC) tests to detect the first two complications. Scintiglo is a small handheld device that detects urinary proteins (should be trace levels in a healthy individual) at a low cost with remarkable accuracy and connects to a smartphone through a custom app. Anupath uses unique test strips for detection of specific biomarkers of diabetes, while also eliminating the need of usual sample preparation that one sees in clinics. Patients can get a comprehensive reading of their plasma and urine protein levels, HbA1c levels blood glucose and hemoglobin. While Sparsha, as the name suggests, focuses on touch-based tests that can diagnose diabetic peripheral neuropathy and send reports via users’ smartphone. Funded by the Department of Biotechnology grant (BIRAC), these start-ups focus on low-cost solutions, so an average user can save money on constant check-ups. Low costs also allow these start-ups to cater to rural segments of India, where a healthcare worker can refer patients to tertiary hospitals based on initial reports by these devices.

The complication of retinopathy, as mentioned above, relates to the slowly progressive disease of the eye and is one of the leading causes of blindness in diabetic patients. This segment is addressed by start-ups like ChironX and Artelus that use artificial intelligence to detect or monitor diabetic retinopathy risks from retinal image scans. Both the start-ups have achieved high accuracy of detection (over 95%) while the technology of AI confers an easy benefit of scanning retinas at a much faster speed to doctors and hospitals. Artelus also boasts to have saved over 3900 eyes so far from diabetic complications.

Given the burden of diabetes in every aspect of life (behavioral, physiological and financial), being handheld into recovery could be motivating for many patients. For maximum impact, we need to reach the furthest demographic corners of India, as diabetes has a growing prevalence in all sectors of the country. Infact, why wait for diabetes to knock at your door? One can also mitigate pre-diabetic conditions or reduce the chances of developing diabetes later in life. These start-ups aim to provide that ecosystem, where a patient can be led into an improved, healthy lifestyle at minimal costs. And just as it is heartening to see the growing awareness of Indians towards their health, it is equally imperative that these solutions are also as democratic as possible. Importantly in a booming start-up scenario, maintaining data integrity, complete transparency between doctors, patients and companies as well as strict adherence to ethical standards would go a long way in ensuring patient trust in this system.

About the author

Urvashi (Raheja) Bhattacharyya is a Biomedical Science graduate from Delhi University and a Ph.D. from National Centre for Biological Sciences. When not running behind her toddler, she spends time reading stuff about the brain, AI, ML, and latest innovations. Writing keeps her calm.

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InnoHEALTH Magazine | Volume 4 Issue 1 | Innovation in Diabetes – Unmet Needs
Highlights

Exclusive interview of H.E Klas Molin, Ambassador of Sweden to India on “Sweden-India collaboration in the health sector”
Digital healthcare
DISHA: Need of the hour. How crucial is DISHA (Act) for the healthcare industry?

The post New Age Solutions for Diabetic Care appeared first on InnoHEALTH magazine.

Challenges and redefining healthcare landscape

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 10:27:29 +0000

Challenges and Redefining Healthcare Landscape

Keynote Address: R. Rengarajan Iyengar
Moderator: Sachin Gaur
Panelists:
• Anjali Kaushik
• Dr. Sanjay Sharma
• Dr. Nimmi Rastogi
• Amit Bhatnagar
• Deepak Mittal

As India evolves from four-cosmo cities to a vast population coming under the modern cities the healthcare landscape evolves tremendously – discuss high profile panelists at the last session of the InnoHEALTH 2017

Opening the discussion, R. Rengarajan Iyengar of HCL Healthcare started very strongly saying, “The need of the hour is to get the authority of the public sector married with the energy and efficiency of the private sector. With changes in the demographics of the country, health care sector is growing into a very profitable sector as more and more cities are emerging as modern cities and expect only the very best in health and medical facilities.”

In support of his belief, he emphasized, “To achieve the above goals, we need to turn to innovative approach of things that may include new technology, newer processes and modern approach to processing and delivery of the best of the facilities. Concepts like telemedicine and cloud computing are also encouraging new players to enter as investors and at the same time luring corporates to invest in this sector.”

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Sachin Gaur, took over as the moderator of the session and brought in his international exposure sharing his experience in the Scandinavian countries and opened the discussion with his view: “New Age requires New Solutions.”

Starting with Dr. Anjali Kaushik, he engaged the panelists with their thoughts on the subject.

“When you are handling large data sets, and that too, sensitive data like the details of patients, their illness; their personal details and their current medical status – there’s always a threat of cyber attack and we have recently seen in the case of UK’s NHS site being hacked and data was compromised. India is no exception to this as many hospitals have been subject to hacking leading to a freeze in the system where doctors could not treat patients without any access to their vital information. For this we have to induce digital hygiene and put systems in place to ensure that our dependency on digital platform doesn’t become a liability to the system,” said Dr Anjali Kaushik.

In contrast to the skeptical approach of Dr. Anjali, Sachin added that, “Hacking of data remains a grave concern for depending on that tool, but that’s only one aspect of it. There are, however, larger benefits of this holistic approach of using digitization with innovative tools. The way forward is for different players to gather their efforts and handle the challenge of collating quality and accurate data with a unified effort,” said Sachin.

“This is what I have witnessed during my trips abroad, especially in the Scandinavian countries where even the government contributes to gather data and process it suitably,” he concluded.

Dr. Sanjay Sharma, from Yostra labs and Vital Sense added, “We have made an effort to innovate in the field of scarcity and help in extending trained hands to help patients recover fast. There are always well-wishers with patients in the hospital, and they are close relatives of the patient who, we realized, can be utilized to help the patients recover fast and contribute to extending health care beyond doctors and medical staff. So, we initiated an innovative approach to train these well-wishers who contribute with total honesty and good intent to learn healthcare basics. The results have been amazing and have in fact contributed to relieving nurses who are over-worked and short staffed.”

Close to Delhi, the latest break through in the healthcare sector is Mohalla Clinics and Dr. Nimmi Rastogi, shared her thoughts on the concept as Health Advisor to the Government of Delhi. “Mohalla Clinic is a nofrills attached basic clinic to provide primary health services to people in the neighborhood. The facility has one doctor and four medical staff including a nurse and a compounder. It’s a prefabricated, air-conditioned facility in less than 100 sq yards with two rooms and basic facilities to store medicines and conduct essential tests.”

Elaborating on the facility, Dr Nimmi added, “The facility extends free facilities – free consultation, free medicines and 110 tests are conducted free of cost for anyone, irrespective if they belong to Delhi or not. Within the first year of its operations we are handling 80-100 patients a day using innovative tools and digital platform.”

Adding human element to innovations, Amit Bhatnagar of Accuster Technologies shared his personal and professional opinion on the subject and said, “When you talk of innovations, it must involve the people and not just development of technology. With such a large number of technically qualified manpower available to us, innovations without involving them are missing the bigger picture. Our journey of innovation is based on the fact that more than 85 crore people do not have access to diagnostic facilities as they live in rural areas. Our objective has been to develop technology that can be rugged enough to reach out to these rural grounds and help provide accurate diagnostics leading to better remedies.”

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Deepak Mittal, concluded the session spelling out the mission of his company that has gone beyond technology and has extended healthcare by clever use of data in relation to the demographics.

“The mission of our company is to prevent and control diseases, improve quality of care and reduce cost of care. With the help of algorithms and artificial intelligence we can map the trends and predict unexpected ailment attacks with respect to the demographics of the region and population,” explained Deepak.

“For this our dependence on data is crucial and I must share that data in the healthcare sector is probably the worst data with no unified parameters on any filter. So the biggest challenge in executing our intentions with honesty and accuracy totally depends on acquiring and collating good quality data,” concluded Deepak.

[vc_cta h2=”Dr. Tarun Ramole”]

“Telemedicine, as a business is a very lucrative platform. The gap between the resources and the users remains very high and in a country like India is not going to be easy to fill that. Telemedicine will be a very reliable option to bridge the gap and that makes it a very viable business option. But, like most business, telemedicine also has challenges that are very unique. Starting with, most start-ups end up replicating what is already there in the market “with improvisations”. What we need is new solutions and not improved solutions. You must think innovatively to innovate things.”

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[vc_cta h2=”Dr Ronald Heslegrave”]

“It’s a huge problem and its problem that’s been prevalent for as long as the Clinical Trials themselves. But we often ask ourselves, ‘Do we know how big the problem is?’ And in all fairness, we didn’t know how big the problem is. Research Integrity can be questioned if the Clinical Trials have been unfair in the process and there have been papers that have been withdrawn by Canadian authorities that have been involving questionable practices – especially involving clinical trials.”

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[vc_cta h2=”Dr Shiban Ganju”]

“We have learnt until now that human body is an amalgamation of cells, tissues and cells. Now, the human body has emerged as a conglomeration of biochemical process that are scattered around and work in close coordination with each other with the sole purpose of keeping the human body alive. Another baffling reality for me is the Ayurveda that introduces us to the benefits of plants and their properties. After all, trees and plants appeared much before the pharma industry. Plants have been in existence for more than two billion years and our pharma is less than 200 years old.”

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Read all the issues of InnoHEALTH magazine:
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 1 (July to September 2016) – https://goo.gl/iWAwN2
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 2 (October to December 2016) – https://goo.gl/4GGMJz
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 1 (January to March 2017) – https://goo.gl/DEyKnw
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 2 (April to June 2017) – https://goo.gl/Nv3eev
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 3 (July to September 2017) – https://goo.gl/MCVjd6
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 4 (October to December 2017) – http://amzn.to/2B2UMLw
InnoHEALTH Volume 3 Issue 1 (January to March 2018) – https://goo.gl/fksdQx

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