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HERAMED LIMITED (HMD) - Transforming Maternity Care: CEO Anoushka Gungadin on HeraCare, HeraBeat, and Innovative Health Solutions for Expectant Mothers

July 17, 2024 • Andrew Musgrave

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Curious about how the latest technology is transforming maternity care? Listen to our insightful conversation with Anoushka Gungadin, the Managing Director and CEO of HeraMED Limited. Anoushka unveils how HeraMED's flagship innovations, HeraCare and HeraBeat, are making prenatal and postpartum care more accessible and efficient. Discover how their proprietary heart rate monitor and comprehensive health platform are setting new standards by focusing on mum-centric care, in contrast to the traditional hospital-centric approach.

In this episode, Anoushka also discusses the incredible growth of the HeraCare platform, which now hosts a record number of active users, enabling the collection of invaluable data for predictive analytics and early detection. Learn about Heramed's strategic partnerships, including collaborations with the University of Technology Sydney and Broward Health, which are pivotal for their commercialization strategy and ongoing research and development. Whether you're an expectant mother, a healthcare provider, or just fascinated by cutting-edge medical technology, this episode is packed with insights you won't want to miss.

Andrew Musgrave:

Welcome to another episode of ASX Briefs, and today we're speaking with Anoushka Gungadin, the Managing Director and CEO of Heramed Limited, a company that's at the forefront of transforming maternity care through its innovative solutions combining state-of-the-art technology with practical applications for expectant mothers and healthcare providers. The company's flagship products, HeraCare and HeraBeat, are designed to transform the prenatal and postpartum experience, making it more accessible and efficient. Anoushka, thanks for joining me today and welcome to the podcast.

Anoushka Gungadin:

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Andrew Musgrave:

Now, if we can just start, if you can give us a brief overview of who Heramed is and the key innovations that set your company apart in the digital maternity care space.

Anoushka Gungadin:

Thank you. Heramed is a medical data and technology company leading the digital transformation of maternity, pregnancy and postpartum care. Our mission really is to improve women's lives, women's health, through maternity. That's where we're starting. We are a hardware and software company. We've got our own proprietary heart rate monitor, which is cloud-based, TGA, FDA, NCE approved, collecting both maternal and fetal data. We've also got HeraCare are platform, which is a comprehensive digital health platform that connects mums with their providers, with their physicians and their care team. What's unique is really the fact that we have created and designed our solution to be mum centric. So it's redefining the relationship between the mum, the expected mum, and their care team, their physicians, as opposed to the model that we have had so far, which is more or less hospital centric.

Andrew Musgrave:

Okay, and you mentioned the HeraCare platform, which has recently achieved a record number of active users, so can you elaborate on what this milestone means for the company and its users?

Anoushka Gungadin:

Yeah, look, the HeraCare platform was originally built to support the fetal heart rate monitor and in building it, and as we continue to get feedback from the market and also from the pilots that we have run, both from users and providers, we continue to enhance what the HeraCare platform offers. So today, what you could think of it is as a platform where a mum is able to have an app on her phone. She's able to measure all her vitals, be it blood pressure, be it fetal heart rate monitor, as well as moods, how she's feeling throughout the pregnancy. We're able, then, to give her educational content that are relevant for her pregnancy, if it's low risk or high risk, and, at the time, whether she's 24 weeks or 30 weeks pregnant, and the physician has the same information pretty much in real time where they can have a view on that. They also are able to then offer telehealth and in between visits, care continues to be delivered and provided through the HeraCare platform.

Anoushka Gungadin:

As of 24th of June, we had 3,575 registered mums on the platform and almost 600 active mums. What that does is allow us to really gather more and more data, so the quality as well as the quantity of the data that we're collecting gives us validation that it is meeting a real need in the market. The quality of data that we're collecting is also, then, for us to build our data as an asset into the future. That then allows us to use that, as well as AI and algorithm, and look at how we can use predictive analytics and offer care early detection. So the more mums we have on the platform, the more data we're able to collect

Andrew Musgrave:

Okay, and HeraMed has entered into a five-year strategic partnership with the University of Technology Sydney, as well as a two-year agreement with Broward Health in Florida, so can you discuss the significance of these two agreements and how it will support your strategy and ongoing research and development efforts?

Anoushka Gungadin:

Yeah, well, both of them play to our four-point plan where there is a commercialization focus, strategic partnerships, also looking at grants and non-dilutive funding. And finally, the last point of the four-point plan is around our brand and thought leadership in this space. So the partnership with UTS allows us to leverage what we bring as a medtech company and what the research institute brings, so we're bringing industry and academia to work together. It allows us to then explore and be eligible to look at grants that are available for women's health. The partnership, the scope of the partnership, is really to look at changing the models of care for women and babies, and over the next five years we will be scoping what that looks like. We'll be working with partners across the ecosystem, be it government, be it hospital. We already have academia and ourselves as a meta company in that space. So that's where UTS is significant. It fits both into the strategic partnership as well as the grants pillar in our four-point plan.

Anoushka Gungadin:

The agreement with Broward is really quite different. This is now allowing us to go in a major hospital in the US. It's one of the 10 largest healthcare networks in the US and Broward is also a safety net hospital. It has a very diverse population of mothers, we are able to implement our technology and, with the partnership, the way we're working with Broward is really to look at their needs, enhance our product, get the feedback, innovate. So all of that is happening in real time through the work we're doing with Broward and it's a big step for us to establish our presence in the US healthcare market.

Andrew Musgrave:

Okay, and the company's recently announced the soft launch of HeraCare through Telstra Health's Medical Director platform. So what impact do you anticipate this partnership will have on your market reach and product adoption?

Anoushka Gungadin:

Yeah, in Australia, GPs play a very big role in pregnancy as well as throughout life or families. In Australia, they are the first, primary point of contact Most people when they're pregnant. That's where they start their journey and the majority of pregnancies of babies are then born in public hospitals. So GPs play a very, very big role in that continuity of care through pregnancy as well as post-delivery. So working with Medical Director Telstra Health platform is crucial for us because it allows us to access a key provider in this pregnancy journey to mums so that's on the provider and for us to really remove barriers to access to care. That does. Telstra Health Partnership allows us to do that.

Anoushka Gungadin:

But we're also working with providers such as Telstra Health, which has an existing network. It has a big digital ecosystem and for us to be able then to integrate with the existing platform makes a lot of sense. It allows us to scale our our growth. Through one partner. We're able to reach and support and work with many GP practices which otherwise we probably couldn't. As a given the size of our company, to be able to support smaller practices would be quite a challenge. This allows us to really access that GP customer base.

Andrew Musgrave:

Okay, and there's a growing number of users on the HeraCare platform now. So how is the company looking to further accelerate that user engagement and are there any plans for more global reach other than Australia and the US?

Anoushka Gungadin:

Yeah, well, the platform itself. As I mentioned earlier regarding Broward, we are able to create, refine, improve care plans that we have in place. Through this real-time implementation, we are able to personalize the user experience. The educational content that we currently have on our platform is through a partnership that we have with the Mayo Clinic. It is in English. The population that we are serving not everyone speaks English, so there is an opportunity and a need for us to offer all of that in different languages. From a platform perspective some of the acceleration in terms of user engagement for us includes our platform being device agnostic and be able to integrate with other wearables that are providing health and medical level data. You look at, for example, blood pressure. We are able to connect with Bluetooth blood pressure monitors, although there's still an option to put all that information into the platform manually as well, but we are making it a lot more easy to use. The user experience currently on the HeraCare app platform is very, very good. I mean we know it's about 85% user satisfaction. We have measured and asked mums for their experience and we continue to improve on that based on the feedback that we are getting. We are also extending our offering in post-pregnancy support, postpartum Again, that's from feedback from providers and users in terms of their needs, and so, from a product perspective, there's a number of innovation that is happening within the company.

Anoushka Gungadin:

In terms of market, we have reached this point. We've got a great technology. Implementation of this technology is the next phase and we want to make sure we are able to really hold a hand and offer customer service at the level that it's needed as we get ready to grow and scale. We've got a presence in Australia, we've got a presence in the US. We will be working very closely with them and then, you know, as we grow and look at other markets. But right now we've got some work happening in Europe. We've got a clinical trial that has been happening, but those two markets are staying our main focus in the short term to make sure that we also ensure customer success in the process.

Andrew Musgrave:

Okay, and just to wrap things up, what are some of the key milestones that investors and stakeholders can look forward to in the next 12 to 18 months?

Anoushka Gungadin:

Yeah, we will continue to execute on our four-point plan that was announced a couple of months ago. To the market, where we will, and then you have the next stage of the progress and implementation. With the Broward, Telstra Health, We've got HeraCare are platform growing. The number of moms is one of the numbers we look very closely and carefully at.

Andrew Musgrave:

Okay, well, that's great getting an update today, Anoushka. So thanks very much for your time and we look forward to further updates from HeraMed in the coming months.

Anoushka Gungadin:

Thanks a lot. Thank you for having me.

Andrew Musgrave:

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.