The health sector today is rapidly moving towards finding improved ways of offering personalization and preventive care. In this day and age, MiraOne has been introduced to bridge the gap between data and actionable wellness. It is a comprehensive blood test that gives a new and better perspective of understanding the body by combining blood markers, genetic insights, and medicine-response analysis into a single report.This holistic approach was founded by Dr. Nickhil Jakatdar, Dr. Nickhil Phadke and Mr.Abhinav Kejriwal. It leverages advanced DNA sequencing across 120 million positions. To know more about MiraOne, we spoke to Dr. Nickhil Jakatdar. He explained in detail why MiraOne is one test with all solutions.MiraOne - the personalised solutionOur conversation started by addressing the biggest health care problem that MiraOne aims at solving. “We've been talking about personalized medicine, but it's become such a buzzword that everyone throws around personalized medicine, precision medicine, and different terms. It is only true if you truly have personal information,” said Jakatdar.He added, “Just getting a blood test, I can get two people whose blood test results say that their LDL cholesterol is 160mg/dL . But I don't know that if of them has a mutation because of which it is 160, even though his lifestyle is perfect. And the other person's lifestyle is messed up; they have no mutation. Both will give the answer of 160, but the conclusions are very different. I can't tell which one of the two should improve their lifestyle.”“MiraOne really does solve one of the biggest problems as it starts giving people very personalized answers,” Dr. Nickhil highlighted.He explained, “When people get personalized answers, they are more willing to act on it than telling somebody, you know, you're already living a very healthy lifestyle, but I want you to live even healthier because your cholesterol is still high. No, in that person's case, the answer is, you might have to start taking statins. Whereas for the other person, it's like, no, don't take statins, first figure out how to improve your lifestyle. Can you please go for a walk post-meal? Can you please start having a little bit more fiber in your diet?”“If you do all of that and still are not improving, okay, then we can talk about medication. But today, medication is the answer for everything. Whether or not, it is the right thing for that person,” he said.MiraOne ensures genetic information is translated into actionable recommendationsInstead of overwhelming users with data, MiraOne aims at giving precise information that is translated into actionable recommendations. However, the question is how? Replying to that, Dr. Nickhil said, “It's a very practical issue. First thing is, even when we do the MiraOne, there could be incidental findings. We ask the patient, "Do you want to know?" Because not everybody wants to know. So we do a very explicit pre-test counselling. Of course, there is post-test counseling to go over the results, but the pre-test counseling is done to first understand your background, and make sure you understand that, hey, do you really want to know certain things?”He further explained, “Some people get energised by knowing that, some people get freaked out knowing that. For instance, if I told someone, you know what, you have this BRCA1, BRCA2 mutation, or you have this one genetic mutation because of which your probability of Alzheimer's is higher. Some people are like, you know what, now that I know that, I am going to do a mammogram every year because I have that BRCA1, BRCA2 mutation, or I'm going to take certain actions because now it's going to motivate me. But for another person, they're like, "Now every day I'm going to be worried about it.”“So we are very clear, this has a lot of power, but do you only want to know the actionable stuff? We explicitly state that you, please go talk to your doctor about this, or start taking this supplement, or start, you know, making these lifestyle changes. That's all actionable because there is something you can do. But what can you really do about it if you have a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation? What you can do is go for a mammogram every year. But you might say, I just don't want to know. I don't want any incidental findings. Only what I've described to you, give me that. So that's how we try to get the best of both worlds, which is you get fed as much information as you are willing to, as much as you want to get,” he added.Evolution of precision medicine and the health-conscious consumersAnother important subject that we touched on during the insightful conversation was whether precision medicine in India has finally reached a tipping point, especially among younger, health-conscious consumers. “I've had all the same observations because I've been doing this for a long time, you know, my own journey,” replied Dr.. Nickhil.Sharing pages from his personal life, he mentioned, “I started my journey 11 years ago. If you were to meet just now in person, you would look at me and say, "Man, you seem like someone who should be healthy," because I'm six feet tall, I'm 68 kgs, I play competitive soccer, I don't drink, I don't smoke, and I don't even drink tea or coffee. And yet, 11 years back, I was diagnosed with heart disease.”“Interestingly, 11 years back, everything I just told you was also true. I was still diagnosed with heart disease; my calcium score should have been zero, but it was 266. I was at the 98th percentile for calcification of my arteries. And the doctor told me you're a walking time bomb. I was like, "This does not make any sense." Then, as I started digging into it, because I'm not a healthcare guy, that was not my background training. Today, I think I can go toe-to-toe with anybody in healthcare. Because for the last 11 years, I immersed myself in it, just so I could understand what's happening to me. And what I learned on this journey was that there are so many small things I was doing wrong,” he shared.“As an example, you know, my favorite thing that I used to have every day, twice a day, was fresh-squeezed orange juice. Today, you ask a cardiologist, and they say, please don't drink orange juice every day. Eat three oranges. Don't drink three oranges worth of orange juice. Now, these are small, small things; nobody became diabetic because they did one bad thing. It's a series of small, small cuts that are adding up,” he explained.With this, he came to the conclusion that knowledge has always been there, “but the amount of data is blowing up. Look at the amount of data your wearables are generating every day.”He added, “Look at the amount of data on social media about the thousands of influencers all telling you completely contrasting, contradicting things. Look at the number of new journal papers on health that are coming out. Today we don't have a data problem. We have a credibility problem because you don't know who to trust. Then, even if you figure out who to trust, you have a data conversion problem. And then you have to convert all this information into action. I might know all the right things to do. But do I really have the motivation to do it?”Dr. Nickhil highlighted, “These three things are the challenge today. The good news is that because of the pandemic, people have now concluded, I do not want to have pre-existing conditions. Because if you have pre-existing conditions, your chances of getting hit by anything are that much higher. So I feel like there's a lot more desire to make a change than ever before. But now people are getting caught in a little bit of a paralysis by analysis type of situation because, okay, I'm ready to make a change to my lifestyle. Where do I start? Because one influencer just told me this, and the next influencer told me the opposite. So while the motivation has kicked in, but the problem is, people don't know what to do, where to start. And so MiraOne is a good place to start because it is all data-driven.”MiraOne - A step towards a bigger changeWith this advanced and action-targeted approach, MiraOne aims at changing the relationship between patients, doctors, and preventive healthcare in India. Shedding light on it, Dr. Jakatdar said, “I think the problem is that the ratio of doctors to patients is getting worse. Thus, patients are becoming more savvy; they want to live healthy, but they get to spend less and less time with the doctors today, which has already happened in the US.”“It's hard to get an appointment with a doctor, and when I get an appointment, it is for 15 minutes. And the concept of a family doctor that used to exist in India is gone. Today, there is no one person who knows everything about you. You go to three different specialists. And they all know their part. Who is the onus on to synthesise all this information and come up with conclusions? It's on you,” he said.He continued, “As consumers, we are not equipped, nor we are not trained to do all of this. So the roadmap for MiraOne should be that in those 10 or 15 minutes that you get with a doctor, this report becomes your single source of truth. The doctor should be able to look at it and say, I get all the different pieces. Their job now is to say, all right, this has done the job of pulling it all together. Now I will tell you what to focus on, what to prioritize. They add their value, which is analyzing a patient's situation. Which doctor today has the time to say, "Okay, give me all your blood test parameters. Let me look at your genetic test. Let me look at your wearable data.” They don't have time for all of that. But now you have painted the whole picture and given them the key takeaways. They'll say, “Yeah, I think, you know, within this, I want you to focus right now on this.”“So it should make the landscape ecosystem a lot more scalable for doctors, for patients, and it should lead to better outcomes,” concluded Dr. Nikhil Jakatdar.