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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Dhruv Suyamprakasam, the founder, CEO, and director of global digital health platform iCliniq. Billed as a “medical second opinion” platform, iCliniq lets users ask specific questions about their health and virtually connects them with medical providers. Suyamprakasam shared some insight on how new technologies and capabilities, including artificial intelligence (AI), are shaping the future of healthcare delivery.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me more about iCliniq and how it works.
We help our patients get connected to healthcare solutions that are reliable, accessible, and really personalized. We have access to high-quality doctors—over 4,300 doctors around the globe—helping patients mostly in the US. We have over 50,000 high-intent content pieces that patients engage with on the platform. We created content as a funnel for users to come to our platform.
Say you search for something like diabetes on any search engine you will end up with the usual suspects like WebMD or Healthline. That’s content that’s pretty generic. You may not get the specific request of the patient. For example, when a patient searches for something like hemoglobin A1C levels being 8.6, the patient may not mention the word diabetes, but it technically means somebody with an A1C level of about 8.6 has diabetes.
The iCliniq content is derived from patient experiences. We have a robust process where the content goes through multiple checks, where we have specialists and also the medical team reviewing everything, and then it’s published on the platform.
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The patient can consult with iCliniq doctors, and the first consultation is offered free of cost.
Is there opportunity to follow up after these consultations?
Yes, there definitely is. The patients get the opportunity to ask a question, and at the same time, doctors also give follow-ups to patients in case the doctor feels that the patient would need a follow-up consultation. In terms of consultations, we have been largely doing second opinions.
We know most patients are anxious. What we do at iCliniq is that we also make sure—in the process of making patients understand concepts through our content—we encourage them to be aware of their health conditions. And that lowers the anxiety when they talk to the doctor.
We are Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center’s partner for select geographies [like India]. So anybody who wants to get an opinion from MSK from these geographies has to go through us.
What opportunities do you see for iCliniq to work with AI or the next generation of technology?
I’m really fascinated with the whole AI technology. We have this approach called “AI as an ally.” We don’t look at AI as something which is dangerous, or which is completely against the work of a doctor. We use several AI things in the ecosystem of the platform to help doctors answer queries, to help our team work faster, and to help patients earlier.