On July 25, 2022, Healthcare Triangle, Inc (HCT), a healthcare information technology company focused on cloud innovative solutions, data science, and data analytics platforms for the healthcare and life sciences industry announced the launch of its Singapore unit with a focus to bolster digital healthcare in Singapore and across the Asia Pacific. ‘Healthcare Triangle Singapore’ is set to invest $25 million at Singapore headquarters and aims to create over 500 jobs in the next five years. In an interaction with BioSpectrum Asia Suresh Venkatachari, Chairman and CEO, Healthcare Triangle (HCT) shares more on the business planning in Asia Pacific with Singapore as the regional hub.

How do you describe the vision and mission toward bolstering digital healthcare in Asia Pacific with the launch of Healthcare Triangle in Singapore?

The APAC region is currently witnessing an increase in the adoption of digitalisation in healthcare and research institutions. As such, Healthcare Triangle’s entry into the region couldn’t be timelier. The growing need for virtual healthcare, clinical information systems (CIS), and electronic medical records (EMR) will propel digital healthcare platform adoption. Through our platform solutions, we support healthcare organisations, healthcare insurance companies, pharmaceutical, and life sciences, biotech companies, and medical device manufacturers in their efforts to improve data management, develop analytical insights into their operations, and measurable clinical, financial, and operational improvements. Singapore will be our APAC regional headquarters as an R&D and sales hub. HCT views its all-new Singapore headquarters as a launch pad to extend its services across APAC. One of Singapore’s Tech Parks will host our active operations. We are liaising with Singapore Economic Board Development (EDB) to set up the innovation hub.

Could you share the investments and fund allocation involved in this expansion plan?

HCT Singapore is the spin-off of our US-based entity. Expansion plans involve an investment of $25 million to leverage cloud-based end-to-end digital transformation in the healthcare and pharma sectors for the region. As per our current investment strategy, roughly around $18-20 million will be dedicated to resources and approximately $5 million to intellectual property (IP) creation, and market research priorities. We anticipate creating over 500 jobs in the next five years. Our joint venture expansion into the region is poised to help further innovation and bolster the role of Singapore as a medical innovation hub. With our existing US hub with expertise in healthcare technology development, we are aiming to help healthcare companies in Asia Pacific scale their digital solutions and innovation in the region. We will accelerate the investments over the next 12 to 24 months. To establish proximity and connectivity with the South East Asian regions we are strengthening our team with multilingual expertise to serve regions like Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and similar. To extend our reach in the Asia Pacific ecosystem, we plan on tapping into Shankar Group, a leading diversified enterprise that has impressive investment records across South Asia, the Middle East, Japan, and Australia. We see active market opportunities in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia markets.

How will Singapore’s new entity differentiate itself from its competitors?

As a leading provider of cloud solutions, we enhance the capabilities of pharma, healthcare, clinical, and hospital solutions to digitise their operations. HCT in Singapore will bolster healthcare by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud. Our expertise processes data across the broad continuum of life sciences research like clinical trials/ genomic research and hospitals to convert them into actionable insights in record time. The huge volume of data generated during the operations and procedures in these entities will be collected, curated, and secured to streamline the defined operation for a productive execution. Our blockchain system can be extended to serve the government and the health institutions, even to build a government-sponsored health information exchange.

Security compliance is the biggest challenge when data is hosted in the public cloud and we have proven our highest level of data privacy by being HITRUST certified for Cloud and Data Platform (CaDP). Globally only 120 companies are certified by HITRUST and we are one among them. This enables us to efficiently and effectively support healthcare providers, payors, hospitals, and pharma/life sciences organisations to improve health outcomes by enabling the adoption of new technologies, data enlightenment, business agility and accelerate response to immediate business needs and competitive threats. We have partnered with leading electronic health record (EHR) vendors like Meditech and Epic Systems. For the cloud operations, we have partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft. We are proud to share that only 8 partners with Google have interoperability of data and we are one of them.

Further, we collect real-time Personal Health Information (PHI) data from hospitals and clinical research organisations (CROs) and process them by segregating essential data from non-essential data. Our comprehensive integrated digital platforms are devoid of manual errors and make remote healthcare affordable. Similarly, life science and pharma research centres can accelerate their protocols with end-to-end operations. Eventually, contract development and manufacturing organisations (CDMOs) benefit from well-curated research data to structure their products and accelerate the innovation and development of novel drugs and therapeutics.

How do you anticipate business growth and scalability in the Asia Pacific region with Singapore as regional headquarters?

HCT has always focused on fostering partnerships and collaborations that help create better and more robust digital healthcare solutions. For instance, although hospitals and pharma industries are part of the same healthcare ecosystems, sharing algorithms and data between them is a tedious, fastidious, and meticulous task due to privacy and security vulnerabilities. In such situations, we act as Neutral Zone partners to bridge both the data sources on our certified and highly secured common platform. Our highly regulated compliance architecture protects patients’ data and extracts clinically essential information using our 3 major proprietary AI platforms. We run the algorithm without the patient’s PHI and thus, only the selected output goes to the pharma company for their innovations without breaching hospital data privacy.

HCT is HITRUST certified and a premier partner of AWS, Google Cloud (GCP) and Microsoft Azure to render trusted multi-cloud services. To provide holistic digital health solutions, they collaborate with Epic and Meditech, a leading EHR. They are one of the few providers in the region that has such a comprehensive network of partners that allows them to support regional and global healthcare projects. We are enabling our platform on the SAS model in the marketplace, and hence upgrading the software or the infrastructure in their cloud digital transcription journey will be cost-effective for the companies.

How will the company contribute to digital healthcare platform adoption and scaling up of opportunity across the APAC region?

The growing demand for low-cost remote patient monitoring services, CIS, and EMRs will propel digital healthcare platform adoption. HCT will leverage its proprietary platform solutions, such as CloudEz, DataEz, and readbl.ai which can help enterprises in their cloud transformation journey. We are confident that our platform solutions will elevate healthcare and life sciences businesses with the power to transform and manage their cloud infrastructure across any CSP (Cloud Service Provider) and empower businesses with utmost security and compliance to harness the full potential of their data and thereby speed up their data-driven digital transformation journey. The highly regulated healthcare and life sciences industries turn to our expertise in digital transformation on the cloud, security and compliance, data lifecycle management, healthcare interoperability, and clinical and business performance optimisation. HCT will be a one-stop solution for cost-effective treatment modes in the background of overwhelming pressure on the healthcare ecosystem and the high cost involved in hospital monitoring.