Anvayaa aims to help the children who are unable to look after their parents due to physical distances. Anvayaa aims to be the support system for all aging parents who live by themselves. Team Anvayaa assists the elderly in health, emergency, daily care, and payment management. The organization provides physical and emotional care for elders and works towards engaging them in social activities. Anvayaa is currently operational in 6 cities and has served over 6000 families from the past 6 years. Mr. Prashanth Reddy, Founder & Managing Director, Anvayaa Kin Care in dicussions with CXOToday shares his insights on the same
- Brief about Anvayaa Kin Care Ltd – How was Anvayaa Conceptualized, Journey So Far, and way forward?
Anvayaa is a Hyderabad-based AI-enabled elder care tech start-up conceived in the year 2016 by Mr. Prashanth Reddy and his wife Ms. Deepika Reddy based on the personal experiences they faced staying away from their aging parents. Being the only child, he decided to come back to India leaving their Permanent residency in USA and Canada to take care of their parents. Their passion for social enterprises to serve senior citizens and bundled with the fact that they are not alone and a lot of other people similar to them have similar issues, they ventured into this opportunity to provide care, comfort, and convenience to the elderly. Anvayaa is spearheading the eldercare and healthcare digital transformation in India, it is the only 360-degree tech-enabled personalized senior care platform taking care of the elderly and providing peace of mind to their families living away from them. It has over 3260 ambulances, and 250 partners in multiple categories such as healthcare, travel, home needs, and utility services. Anvayaa helps the children who are unable to look after their elderly parents due to physical distances. Anvayaa aims to be the support system for all aging parents who live by themselves. Team Anvayaa assists the elderly in health, emergency, daily care, and payment management. The organization provides physical and emotional care for elders and works towards engaging them in social activities. Anvayaa is currently operational in 11 cities and has served over 6000 families for the past 6 years.
- What is the need and requirement for a service like Anvayaa? What are the prospects for growth in the future for elder care services in India?
India today enjoys a young population dividend; In the next few decades, the aging population is set to grow to ~350 million by 2050. The growing elderly population increased life expectancy, improved affordability, shifting disease burden & changing family structures are driving the need for senior care both medical & non-medical. With an increasingly aging population, Factors like early retirement, Rise in empty nest syndromes, Limited mobility with age, living independently with limited support, and Low quality of social relationships there is already an immense burden and an increase in demand for both care and trained resources. A one-stop Solution is missing in the current scenario to provide a solution to the elderly and minimize their anxiety and pain. Anvayaa is bridging this gap by providing physical, social, and emotional care to elderly families. Apart from providing personalized and emotional care through Care Managers of Anvayaa, we also offer a few specialty services through a tie-up with a Partner Network. We assist in upgrading the skills of the partner network and establishing capacity in the new location. The ecosystem is connected to our technology platform. We have “Web application/mobile applications” where the customer can sign up and update the information. The application enables seamless information flow with all the stakeholders. To grow & launch our services in any new location, we just recruit a care manager in that location, who does the local liaison for operations. Our 24X7 Care Coordinators – multi-lingual (support team) is centrally placed and coordinates in delivery of the services across any location. We also have centralized partnerships, those that have PAN India presence making us scale seamlessly.
Eldercare in India has significant growth potential and one can provide elderly care through multiple channels. It could be senior living homes, palliative/transition care services, Day Care centers, social engagement, and many more. The scope is very vast in the country but any entrepreneur who wants to come into this space needs a different mindset and not looks at this as any other tech/e-commerce venture.
With the growing elderly population, increasing nuclear families, and life expectancy, it is anticipated in my view that the Senior Care industry will be about a 15-billion-dollar industry and needs to be categorized as an Industry rather than putting in healthcare, etc.
- How effective will technology is in elder care services?
We believe technology has always been an enabler for us. By far, have the most innovative technology platform in the entire country in the elder care space for efficient care and predictable service for senior citizens. Technology keeps our users updated with medical reports, emergency information, and daily activities, and empowers them to conveniently track these in the web portal and mobile apps both on iOS and Android. The Tech Platform consists of Customer Care (CRM) / OA&M for internal operations. Emergency Handler, Payment Management- Wallet, Customer Request Handler, Customer Plans Management, MIS Reports, GIS / GPS Interfaces, Automatic Reminders module, Vendor / Partner eco-system Interfaces, and third party Integration Layer for subscription payments. This helps us ensure that we can be operationally efficient and have checks and balances in place at all stages using technology.
Handling emergencies has been very effective for Anvayaa to help their members and we handled about 350+ emergencies – saved 97% of lives while being able to respond within 3 minutes of the known emergency. All this was possible with the use of technology and process.
In our view technology has a major role to play in elder care but the challenge is to use technology that is not intrusive to the elderly but more friendly to use.
- What is your innovation for the emergency care of the elders?
At Anvayaa we have been consistently studying the problems that we face on a day-to-day basis and look for opportunities to use technology to better our services and provide the needed care, comfort, and convenience to the elderly.
- Anvayaa’s has recently launched Home Dementia Care for Senior Citizens: We have developed an AI-based customizable module to provide personalized care for people with Dementia (PWD) and help them live with dignity. With the disruptive use of the innovative technology platform built using Artificial Intelligence, the Platform constantly guides the caregiver by giving them the ability to ensure the PWD is meaningfully engaged. The platform suggests dementia stage-appropriate activities automatically and the directions to increase their physical, emotional, and cognitive well-being. The process enables efficient care and predictable services for senior citizens with dementia supported by a network of trained clinicians and Care Managers.
- Our other innovation is to bring a wearable solution. Our ASERS (Anvayaa’s Smart Emergency Response System) is a smart wearable device for seniors which are manufactured in India. ASERS allows for the collection of important health information such as vitals, social isolation, falls, and more. These health indicators combined with the smartwatch’s data set – including reminder alerts, steps, heart rate, and location – provide a comprehensive view of the individual and facilitate proactive care for seniors. It has an easy-to-use SOS button with a microphone.
This will be the first in India to bring in proactive care and that will be connected to a stigma-free emergency response Support Center that operates 24/7. Seniors can activate 24/7 emergencies directly from the watch. The service offered along with AERS establishes a trusted relationship with the end-user (Elderly) that enables the ability to remotely capture location information and other data and insights. The nearest Care teams (Care managers) are notified of events (SOS) and they act upon a pre-determined emergency care plan such as booking an ambulance and/or emergency visit to the nearest healthcare provider that is mapped on the cloud, allowing them to offer seamless support at critical times.
- What is the technology platform? How does it help in providing predictive care for the elders?
Anvayaa is continuously working towards providing “Predictable Care” for its members by clearly establishing and training easy-to-use SoP’s and being able to bring transparency in service delivery to all its members using technology. This way the members also experience and are able to predict that it will happen in a certain way without a cause of surprise.
- Are you looking at introducing some disruptive devices for proactive elder care? Please elaborate?
We are manufacturing our Patent Pending, Smart wearable devices that will help in providing proactive care. This is entirely done by Anvayaa and is being developed based on the learnings we have from our experiences on what could be the improved solution for seniors. These devices are manufactured in India and the first lot is expected to be launched in August 2022.
The team is continuously working towards launching new technologies and is exploring suitability for the Indian elderly or to customize it to India.
