His chronic illness inspired him to tackle diabetes in India with a mobile app

India is the diabetes capital of the world, with 69.1 million cases of diabetes in the country in 2015. Any venture into helping with that disease is a good bet. For Raghuraj Sunder Raju, the interest was a little more personal.

In 2013, he was diagnosed with a chronic illness. The illness was manageable but required a lifestyle change. That got him thinking. He talked to doctors and decided that there was a big gap between what patients with chronic diseases like diabetes needed and what support was currently available.

“I was personally frustrated,” he tells Tech in Asia. “It was not efficiently managed. It’s a big problem, and there are not solutions that deal with it in the right manner.” Physical treatments are only part of the equation. Patients also need support – managing a disease that they have just found out that they have can seem daunting, making day-to-day tasks like measuring blood sugar difficult.

I was personally frustrated. It was not efficiently managed.

He also found that doctors saw the chronic diseases as more of a sprint than a marathon type of problem. “Doctors were treating [chronic cases] like they treated acute cases,” he explains. This left patients to figure out how to manage their diseases by themselves.

Two years ago, after spending some time talking to more doctors and diabetes patients, he quit his job at Huawei to pursue Bangalore-based HealthPlix, a mobile app that connects patients to their doctors for real-time messaging. Patients can also record their blood sugar, meals, activity, and insulin intake. The app can keep their charts and medical records, which can be shared with their physicians. Patients can also view tips for managing their disease.

Doctors can charge patients through HealthPlix. Patients pay HealthPlix a one-time fee based on how long and how much they will use the app.

It’s a solution that’s convenient for patient and doctor. Raghuraj offers an example: a patient can have high blood sugar, but the treatment for a reading of 250 would be very different from a reading of 450. Getting this information to a doctor over the app would help to get patients the right kind of help sooner.

According to Raghuraj, having a doctor on hand (literally) helps patients keep coming back to their physicians. Doctors can download HealthPlix’s accompanying app for doctors called HealthPlix MD. He says there are currently 20-25 active doctors using the app with 850 patients. The company has a staff of eight, including endocrinologist Dr. Sydney D’Souza as a medical advisor.