During her first pregnancy, Ivy, despite the fact that she was in the possession of a skilled OB/GYN, had 100 inquiries at the forefront of her thoughts. Intricacies would emerge, however they were excessively minor or flitting to counsel a specialist. She had no clue about who to take them to.
Her girl, Ameena, was conceived. Her girl continued to develop, so did her inquiries. Telemedicine didn’t exist in those days.
Before long, her mom got determined to have bosom malignancy. The entire course of searching out specialists, discussing it, and managing the social disgrace, sent her mom into discouragement.
“I saw there was a gigantic hole in having the option to get to superior grade, locally applicable data, and disgrace-free master guidance. It negatively affected my mom,” said Ivy Huq Russell.
In 2011, Ivy began a blog named Maya (named after her mom), where she wrote down her excursion as a mother and a girl of a malignancy patient. Individuals began contacting her with many inquiries. Ivy acknowledged then she needed to transform this into a stage.
Quick forward ten years, Maya blog is presently a message-based computerized prosperity aide discussion administration that pays attention to everybody’s concerns in Bangla, English, and surprisingly in Banglish as well.
What’s more Maya utilizes a chatbot to screen the essential inquiries and around 70% questions are purportedly settled utilizing man-made consciousness, with around 95% precision.
Up until this point, Maya has served 15 million individuals on all stages, and 33% of them have been treated with meetings. A group of 250 to 300 individuals are attempting to offer types of assistance to its clients, including Maya specialists.
The Maya application is accessible in four unique dialects: Bangla, English, Urdu and Sinhala. From one side of the planet to the other, around 7 million individuals connect with the Maya consistently. For the most part, in the wake of dropping an inquiry, inside 14 seconds, a specialist returns to the inquiry. Thusly, it has served 30 million clients around the world.
Their application has been downloaded 3.4 multiple times in Bangladesh and got a 4.2 rating in the Google play store. By and large, consistently, there are around 3,50,000 dynamic clients of Maya.
How Maya functions
Once the application is introduced, its interface will show many provisions. From checking manifestations to period following and medication orders – everything is accessible on this one application. Clients can pose any inquiry while staying mysterious. Strangely, one may as of now find the majority of his/her responses to fundamental inquiries in the inquiry segment.
The Maya bot can order touchy inquiries and points in shading code, featuring its seriousness for Maya specialists. The Maya group comprehends that the assistance that they are giving is very touchy. Consequently, the group doesn’t completely depend on its bot. It has a devoted group that audits the inquiries and replies to check whether they are satisfactory. Criticisms and appraisals are a way of assessing the Maya specialists, as per Maya’s nation supervisor, Marc Thiry.
One can set a video call meeting with specialists by spending just Tk250 for an immediate and explicit arrangement. Afterward, one will get e-remedies by means of mail and can buy medication through the application or at a drug store.
“However our objective segment is the upper-working class, working-class, and hopeful upper working class, we are attempting to roll out certain improvements and keep it open for everybody. Thus, we continue to offer markdown offers and advance things like scratch cards or free telephone counsels over our hotline number,” said Adrika Sheik, Marketing Executive of Maya.
Individuals who might somehow or another not have the option to bear the cost of a video meeting with a specialist can utilize Maya’s scratch card at a cost of just Tk30.
Utilizing the cards, each can book one arrangement in turn with a Maya master, through the Maya application. However right now it is just accessible in the northern piece of Bangladesh, group Maya is dealing with creating it more in mass and advancing it, so it turns out to be all the more generally acknowledged and utilized by clients, uncommonly the underestimated populace.
Maya is advancing these scratch cards at the side of the road tea slows down with the goal that everybody can approach them.
Maya is likewise working with a couple of pieces of clothing organizations and giving free telemedicine administrations through their hotline number. Increasingly more article of clothing organizations are becoming keen on taking their administrations.
It likewise offers types of assistance to the female part of corporate workplaces at various value ranges, from Tk99 to Tk499 each month for every client. Under this charge, it covers all the medical problems.
The development story
Maya accepted its first seed financing in 2015. However it at first wanted to serve just ladies, it before long saw that around 40% of its clients were male. In this way, it began offering types of assistance for a wide range of medical problems.
This February, Maya brought $2.2 million up in seed financing drove by the beginning phase investment store Anchorless Bangladesh and The Osiris Group, a Hong Kong-based private value firm. It is the biggest raised sum by a Bangladeshi wellbeing tech organization up until this point. Maya has utilized this financing to rebuild the application to give more elements and guarantee start to finish encoded administration.
“There is one specialist for 10,000 patients in Bangladesh. Besides, the wellbeing framework here is capital-driven, yet 70% of the country’s populace lives outside Dhaka. In this way, patients from remote spots need to head out far to visit a specialist. This is the place where the Maya application comes in, which can instinctively get questions, give replies, and allude the client to a specialist,” clarified Marc.
Maya accepts that it can diminish the shortage of specialists. To ease difficulties for patients, it has assembled a component of a lab symptomatic focus with uncommon rebate offers, working together with analytic focuses in the capital, where clients can appreciate home example assortment, just reports and can likewise arrange medications.
Additionally, a piece of the seed financing is being put resources into growing Maya in Pakistan and building an application in Urdu with similar elements. Clarifying the purpose for growing in Pakistan, Marc emphasized, “Pakistan is like Bangladesh as far as strict and social marks of disgrace. Yet, Pakistan is somewhat exceptional in innovation so we figured it would be simpler for us to grow in an open market.
That doesn’t mean we are not intrigued by other South Asian nations. All things considered, we are consistently open for new freedoms, and possibly we will extend soon in different nations as well.”
Maya needs to grow and make its administrations accessible all around the nation, building up a wide organization of emergency clinics, drug stores, and lab analytic focuses to guarantee brief medication conveyance, alluding clients to clinical focuses and gathering tests. Over the long haul, it needs to accomplish better combination of Maya’s administrations in the medical care industry, among both the specialists and clients. By 2025, Maya intends to be the name that strikes a chord when they are looking for medical care.
In the following stage, it needs to consolidate AI-driven diagnostics in medical clinics, labs, and applications. It additionally means to digitize the entire medical care framework soon so a piece of therapy should be possible at home with the assistance of innovation.
At last, Marc added, “Telemedicine won’t ever have the option to supplant actual medical care, however, it can generally supplement it by offering great quality types of assistance. Coronavirus has likewise pushed us to get familiar with this sort of administration. Thus, we need to rehearse this and free the best once again from it.
