Building a Capital Efficient Healthcare AI Venture to $20M: Deepak Gaddipati, Founder and CTO of VirtuSense (Part 5)

Deepak Gaddipati: If you’re over 65, that person is 33% likely to fall. Of the 33%, 20% will get a major injury, about 6% will have falls with major injuries. Once you have a fall with a major injury, your immediate cost is about $34,000 for treatment. If a person falls – not just falls with injury – the likelihood of dying within the next 12 months is over 70%. The stats are pretty much stacked against someone who falls.

When we look at hospitals, it was reacting. What we did in 2016 was we took a portion of the company and asked them to work on the LiDAR technology in-room. We had a sensor that goes on the wall. It reconstructs the whole room in 3D and figures out where everything is.

We collected about 2.5 million hours of data on what people do before they get up from bed and before they get up from the chair. We train the AI and develop an algorithm that knows a person is going to get up from the bed 30 to 60 seconds before they get up from the bed. Then the system triggers an alarm saying, “Please don’t get up. Someone will come in and help you.”

The nurses are sent alarms in their stations. When these nurses come in, the patients are still on their beds. This is how we prevented 70% to 80% of falls in hospital rooms. That has been our new one that came out in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe.

Plan A was more ambulatory care. B plan was to go inside hospital rooms. Today, we have thousands of rooms where we have these technologies. We’re averaging a 70% reduction in falls and close to 80% reduction in falls with injuries. Third, we are launching a home product. You can’t just make an impact by just solving one problem in one place. You just need to carry through so you can see the real impact.

Sramana Mitra: How big is your engineering team?

Deepak Gaddipati: 65. 20% are here. We have US core operations and we have an offshore team where we have a lot of engineers. The Peoria team is more computer vision and AI and the backend development is offshore.

Sramana Mitra: In India?

Deepak Gaddipati: In Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic.

Deepak Gaddipati: We knew it was not sustainable to do everything given the capital that we had. We looked first at India. There are a lot of smart engineers in India. The people who are there and are really good demand a lot of money. Almost 50% of the cost in the US.

Sramana Mitra: Very expensive and the attrition is very high. It’s difficult to do product work there. How did you get connected in Rawalpindi?

Deepak Gaddipati: I had a friend from Pakistan who I’ve worked with before. He helped me set up that whole office. This is a subsidiary of VirtuSense.

Sramana Mitra: You still needed somebody to build the team?

Deepak Gaddipati: He built the team. He helped us set this whole thing up and get this up and running. We started with five to six people. That grew. The core algorithms and AI is done here. The standard apps and backend are done offshore.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the core algorithm engineering team, where do you hire them from?

Deepak Gaddipati: All over. We have a lot of University of Missouri and the University of Illinois.

Sramana Mitra: People are willing to move where you are?

Deepak Gaddipati: It was tough, but yes. Initially, it was a couple of guys from Bradley. One thing that the current generation really connects with is the impact that you have on society. Today, we take care of over 1.2 million seniors on our platform, all in the US. In the last three years, there’s been research on us. It’s unbiased. We didn’t pay them anything. It was on the impact of VirtuSense on society.

They took all the data from all our published data and CMS data. They said that in the last three years, we’ve prevented about 106,000 falls and about 23,000 falls with major injuries that would have resulted in hospital admissions. This is just in the last three years.

Sramana Mitra: You have a long way to go from an available market point of view. Fantastic! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Capital Efficient Healthcare AI Venture to $20M: Deepak Gaddipati, Founder and CTO of VirtuSense
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