What was the idea behind establishing this start-up? What is the USP of your business?
India has the largest adolescent as well as school going population in the world. We have more children in school than the total population of some of the largest countries in the world and yet our pediatric healthcare system is fragmented, broken, and of low quality.
The clinics and the hospitals mostly focus on acute care or reactionary care. Children are growing every day, physically and mentally to face the world, and this very aspect of their growth and development is ignored by the current system. We can attribute the low pediatrician-to-population ratio partly however an overhaul of the current system is required.
With the help of technology and a doctor-in-the-loop; we can also assess kids with automated sensors that are medical grade and noninvasive in a secure, private and effective manner.
This is how SKIDS was born. Not only are we addressing the shortage of skilled manpower through sensors and AI, but we are also intervening in the physical, mental, and social well-being sphere of children. SKIDS is the world's first full-scale comprehensive pediatric health system that can assess each and every kid for more than 70 parameters as well as intervene to bring them back to their full potential.
What kind of challenges and obstacles were faced by you in the beginning? Please elaborate.
One thing we often hear from our customers is – “Your solution is too good to be true”, while this may sound very flattering but this puts a lot of responsibility on us to educate our customers about the technology we use and its accuracy. We overcome this by doing a live demo at schools and clinics; and showcasing the entire product end-to-end, which helps in building confidence in deploying the solution at our schools.
How has been the journey so far? Any particular learning?SKIDS is funded by marquee angel investors based out of Singapore and the US. The company is revenue positive in a very short span of time and is growing with double-digit numbers every month. We are also looking to expand the program across school communities in Tier-1 cities in India and have a target of onboarding 5,00,000 students in the next 3 years. SKIDS is also expanding its clinical network in Bangalore, Delhi-NCR and plans to open more clinics in other Tier-1 cities.
Business Success So Far
Though SKIDS has been operational for more than 5 years, the full-scale commercial operations started from January 2023. Within six months of launch, SKIDS has on-boarded more than 30,000 students and treated more than 5,000 kids across its state-of-the-art clinics in Bangalore. SKIDS is set to onboard 60,000 students by the end of 2023 with expansion in Bangalore, Delhi-NCR, and Hyderabad over the next 12 months.
How Skids is empowering families to protect their kids through customized healthcare services
The current pediatric care model is 'event' focused particularly on the issues of sickness, illness or immunization. In simpler terms - we take our kids to doctors when they are sick or ill, and there often is a big blank space between these events. And even when we take kids to doctors, we focus on the sickness the child is going through at that particular time, with less or no focus on understanding the growth and health of other bodily functions such as eyes, ears, heart, lungs, oral health or psychological factors such as anxiety, ADHD, autism, depression among others. SKIDS is building a clinic network with a strong digital presence that offers the highest standards of care outcomes - whether kids are at home or at school. SKIDS screens kids for more than 70+ parameters across physical and behavioral health that helps to discover any early warning signals and incorporate specialist interventions to reverse or cure any underlying conditions before they become irreversible or severe that may impede the quality of life.
How Skids is addressing pediatric care by deploying world-class medical-grade non-invasive and kid-friendly technology for holistic preventive and specialist care for kids.
At SKIDS, we believe technology with a doctor-in-the-loop can vastly improve care outcomes, however, a lot of technology that is currently used by caregivers is either consumer-grade, inaccurate, or not kids-friendly. In India, 58.5% percent of children between the age of 6 months to 5 years were anemic during 2015–2016 as per a survey by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and ICF. However, the current mechanisms for anemia screening are either subjective - such as color comparison of eyes or skin; or kid unfriendly such as needle prick-based blood tests. At SKIDS, we do a highly accurate non-invasive anemia test using FDA approved solution that is accurate, fast, and as easy as doing pulse oximetry.
Another case worth highlighting is vision issues among children. In India, 23-30% of children suffer from myopia and in the majority of cases, caregivers such as parents or teachers come to know of vision issues very late, once the vision deterioration has set in. The conventional method followed for vision screening is a visual acuity test which is time-consuming, subjective, and misses on other important vision issues such as amblyopia, strabismus etc. which if left undetected can cause serious permanent vision impairment. At SKIDS, we use world-class auto refraction-based technology which is similar to almost taking a selfie and in less than 30 seconds, we are able to detect seven parameters related to vision health.
