BeatO, a digital care platform for controlling and reversing diabetes claims to have observed 20x growth in the number of female users in the last five years. The digital care platform has reportedly impacted the lives of over 6 lakh women in which 9 per cent of these women belong to the age group of 18 to 25 years, followed by 16 per cent in the age group of 26 to 35 years, 18 per cent from 36-45 years, the largest segment of 25 per cent are in 46 to 55 years age group, 19 per cent are 56-65 years and remaining 13 per cent are from over 65 years age group.
40 per cent BeatO’s female users are from metros whereas the majority share of 60 per cent belongs to tier-II, III, IV and beyond.
While a recent study conducted by experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Indian Statistical Institute, Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council and Harvard University revealed that Indian women suffer gender bias while accessing healthcare and gender stereotypes prevent women from voicing their health problems, BeatO is successfully breaking this barrier and providing its female users accessible affordable diabetes care through its app and digital technology, said the company.
“Technology has the potential to improve the quality of life for everyone, in every nook and corner of the country, so we are glad to see the uptick in the number of female users coming to BeatO from all corners of India. We expect an exponential increase in our female users in the near future as well who will go on to become the flag bearers of the much-needed health-tech revolution in India,” observed Gautam Chopra, founder and chief executive officer (CEO), BeatO.
“As per Nielsen’s Bharat 2.0 Internet study, 1 in every 3 females in rural India is actively using the internet. Female users’ growth in the last two years is a whopping 61 per cent as compared to male users whose numbers grew at 24 per cent,” he added.
BeatO conducted a survey on ‘Gender differences in accessing and utilising digital diabetes support platforms in India: Analysis of one million (10,33,148) users’ on their platform. The results of the survey were published with the International Diabetes Federation in 2022.
The findings revealed that though the prevalence of diabetes among women (8.4 per cent), is only slightly lower than that among men (9.1 per cent) yet women face many more hurdles in the accessibility and utilisation of digital care. Whilst there has been a very strong uplift in the number of women on BeatO recently, but still with just ~27 per cent of the users being female, BeatO expects to witness an even sharper increase in the coming years as there is still a considerable gender gap in accessing and utilising digital health platforms in India for female users.
The need to increase the availability and awareness of digital platforms among females with diabetes to improve access to diabetes management is therefore crucial and is currently being addressed by BeatO’s digital comprehensive diabetes care platform.
Among females, the mean age of women accessing BeatO was 48.24 years; the majority had T2DM (95 per cent) with a mean duration of 9.42 years. The majority of females belong to the metro (40 per cent), followed by Tier-IV (32 per cent), Tier-II/Tier III (28 per cent).
Today all stakeholders like government, institutions, policymakers, private players, etc. must leverage the power of technology to reach every Indian household. The very first step must be to address the healthcare needs of females because bringing one woman under the umbrella of cover is to reach multiple families together.
