Sometimes, changing the way you deal with a problem can change the game for you. For a while, healthcare IT would produce apps and products that only catered to the hospital’s side of healthcare. They missed a very vital link. The patients. For whom the hospitals were created in the first place. Patient engagement and innovation was often ignored by the healthcare IT. This left the patients to rely solely on traditional tools like pen and paper to keep track of their doctor appointments, medicine schedules and track vitals. 

Manu Madhusudanan saw firsthand how his high blood pressure mother and pneumonia suffering daughter relied solely on paper notes to keep track of their vitals and other medical information. Error in recording these notes could have drastic and negative consequences. He decided to change that. Along with Prabhakaran T.P, he started Cooey Health in 2015. 

The word 'cooey' is used by Australian aborigines to call one's attention. Cooey is an app that acts like your ‘health vault’ by keeping track of your vitals for BP, sugar and weight. The app uses IoT, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help patients suffering from diabetes (77 million Indians), hypertension (130 million Indians) and obesity (135 million Indians) track their vitals. The tracking of such vitals via your phone is easier and more convenient for the patient. 

They have created smart voice assistance named ‘Maya’. The voice interface helps the elderly, bed-ridden and illiterate who cannot input instructions themselves give and receive oral commands. This makes the app more reachable to a wider set of Indian audiences. Maya provides voice inputs about your routine health tasks.

Cooey received funding from multiple angel investors. In their last 3 funding rounds, they have raised $1.7 million. They now operate from India, the US, Japan and Singapore. 60% of their customers are from India, while the rest come from different geographies. With 748 million smartphone mobile users in India, Cooey aims to become the WhatsApp of the Healthcare industry. Was the perspective shift of thinking from the patient’s end a valuable lesson from Cooey Health?