Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you validated the TB use case in 2018, did you put that as your only use case? Were you doing other radiology use cases as well?

Prashant Warier: We had a lot of other use cases. We are also working on a head CT product. Chest X-rays has a high volume. The other one requires speed. AI can manage volume and speed. Head CTs are taken when you’re looking at critical cases. When you want to do something quickly, you do a CT. You need a fast interpretation there. For a stroke patient, for every minute that goes by, brain cells are dying. You want to intervene quickly.

Intervention is sometimes slow, especially at night because radiologists are not available. It’s a long duration. Why not use AI to interpret these scans? The use cases are simple. There are two kinds of treatment for stroke. One is thrombolytic and the other is thrombectomy. Thrombolytic is when you administer an anti-coagulant which will dissolve the clot in the brain. If you administer it to someone who has a bleed, their bleed will worsen. It will be fatal.

You want to rule out a bleed so you can administer that thrombolytic agent. That is what we are able to do within a minute. Second is to perform a thrombectomy. For that, you have to look at a larger area. That’s something that we build technology for. We enable people to do treatments easier using our technology. There are other kinds of interventions. Those are things that the algorithm can pick up.

Sramana Mitra: This product was ready at what point?

Prashant Warier: We had this product ready in 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Are you also selling in the US?

Prashant Warier: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about your go-to market strategy and how you penetrate the market. You’ve talked about your product strategy. It’s fascinating. Talk about how you navigated the market.

Prashant Warier: We ended up doing a lot of business development in India. It’s a tough B2B market for any kind of product. The prices are low.

Sramana Mitra: Very high touch, but people wiling to pay very little.

Prashant Warier: Yes. We figured that out. We said, “Let’s look at other markets.” The US is a bit hard. The payer and the provider are different. When you sell something to the provider, they’re not incentivized to improve the quality of care unless there is a reimbursement from the payer.

Sramana Mitra: American healthcare is a big mess.

Prashant Warier: That reimbursement also takes time. We decided to look at provider and payer together like NHS. Middle East was a market. We looked at Oman and Qatar. All these are funded by the government. We went to these markets and saw that there was a good opportunity. The UK became successful for us. The UK is our biggest market. That became a good market for us.

The other market is the global health market. I spoke about TB. TB is a problem in most of the low-income countries. There is some funding coming from the government. There are also these developmental organizations. There are so many others who are funding these programs to do TB screening. We also worked with individual governments. That was a go-to market for us. The US is by far the largest healthcare market. We could build a business in US and never get out. US is always interesting to us.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Global AI Venture for Medical Imaging Analysis from India: Prashant Warier, CEO of Qure.ai
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