Start-up helps rural India patients with free medical aid to tackle Covid-19

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<strong>With the Covid-19 pandemic spreading beyond India's urban heartland, a Bhubaneshwar-based startup, Lyflink, is offering freee consultation and medicines to patients in Odisha’s rural pockets.</strong></p>
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The startup provides a link through tele-consultations to connect the infected patients in both rural and urban areas with Coronavirus specialists.</p>
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Lyflink, was founded by Dr (Major) Sarthak Patnaik, a sports surgeon and professor of Arthroscopy and Sports Medicine at SUM Ultimate. He co-founded the start-up in 2017 with Tushar Patnaik, Kamini Parmar, and Harish Kumar with the objective to connect rural area patients with Bhubaneswar-based specialists.</p>
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<strong>Covid-19 Special Packages</strong></p>
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On realising that the difficulties faced by the rural area patients to get medical advice from specialists, the start-up team introduced two packages on the healthcare platform recently. These are COVID-14 and Post COVID Care.</p>
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In the COVID-14 package, the health condition of the patient infected with the virus is monitored round-the-clock by a specialist every day. This monitoring is done throughout the isolation period of 14 days. Besides this, they also have facilities of free drug delivery and tests and also on-call nursing care for the elderly.</p>
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Talking to the Express News Service, Patnaik said: "Similarly in the post COVID care package, we offer consultations to patients on medicines, exercises and diets to help them recover.” Incidentally, Patnaik served the Indian Army for five years as a Major.</p>
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Lyflink in order to serve the patients has 400 specialists like orthopaedics, neurologists, oncologists, pulmonologists, besides, nurses for tele-consultations. At present it is running five digital clinics at Sainatala in Balangir, Binka in Sonepur, Begunia in Khurda, Keonjhar and Ganganagar at Bhubaneswar.</p>
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<strong>Health kiosks and free medicines</strong></p>
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Equipped with the Lyflink link and laptop, these digital clinics are health kiosks allowing the patients to connect with doctors. Giving these details, Patnaik, added that poor patients who come to the digital clinics are provided free consultation.</p>
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Adding an important dimension to the start-up, recently the team also started a Covid medicine bank. Called Lyflink Cross, it collects unused Covid-19 medicines donated by people and gives to those who can’t afford them.</p>
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<strong>How did it all start?</strong></p>
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While the venture was conceptualised by Dr Sarthak Patnaik, the Founder and CEO, and an orthopaedic specialist, Tushar Patnaik and Harish Kumar are engineers involved in the technical aspects of the platform. The financial aspects are taken care of by Kamini Parmar who is a masters in business administration.</p>
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The co-founder Tushar was quoted in YourStory saying that Lyflink, the telemedicine start-up allowed users to get access to teleconsultations through video, audio, and chat via its website or mobile app.</p>
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Giving details, he also added that the startup offered two mobile applications: the Lyflink Patient app, used by patients to search doctors and book appointments, and the Lyflink Doctor app that enables doctors to manage appointments, patients, and clinics.</p>
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Besides searching and choosing doctors from anywhere in India, patients can also select the preferred mode of consultation, upload health reports, describe their issues, pay the consultation fees online, and connect with the doctor.</p>
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Further he said that Lyflink partnered with diagnostic centres to enable patients to get tests done that are suggested during teleconsultations. These centres automatically update results on the apps, allowing the doctor and the patient to take the treatments further.</p>
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He informed YourStory that “The application allows doctors to store and access patient data, prescriptions etc securely. Apart from this, patients can also ask questions about their health to a panel of doctors for free, prior to consultation.”</p>
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By working with medicine store owners, Lyflink is empowering them to enable consultations using the application. By reaching out to these stores, the patients can get in touch with doctors online.</p>
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