She was the young Zealander of the year 2010, the Indian New Zealander 2011 and recently was awarded the Young Alumna of the year 2016 at University of Auckland. Now based in San Francisco, Dr Divya Dhar, has recently completed a dual Master of Business Administration (majoring in healthcare management) and a Master of Public Administration (majoring in business and government), a degree at the Wharton School and Harvard Kennedy School.

The P3 foundation

With a mission to end ‘extreme poverty within our generation’, she started P3 Foundation—a non-profit organisation run by and for youth in 2009. Dhar considers the launch of the foundation as her biggest success.

She says, “I always believed in the power of young people to change the course of history. Working with the team at P3 Foundation is still one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. We run awesome events such as World Changers Conference this May! We are also doing fundraisers such as our effort to support Oxfam for collections for Cyclone Winston (in Fiji).”

Goodbye pagers

This young Kiwi-Indian is now building a bridge between medicine and people with Seratis, a platform to enable care coordination for healthcare providers.

“I found that I was wasting about an hour every day failing to reach other health professionals such as nurses, occupational therapists or speech therapists. I found this to be such a pain, that I wanted to help solve it. That's how Seratis was born,” Dhar says.While at Wharton, Dhar along with his classmate Lane Rettig decided to end the use of pagers in hospitals and thus co-founded Seratis with Lane.

Seratis is a patient-centric mobile communication app that takes advantage of smartphone capabilities to allow healthcare providers to coordinate, track and analyse patient data.

Divya launched the app at several American healthcare providers with the help of her top talent team. Seratis won the $850,000 Verizon Healthcare Innovation Award in 2014 and the app has been featured in several major publications including Huffington Post, Techcrunch and Boston Globe.

So how does Seratis actually work?

“Using a pager was wasting about an hour a day trying to reach my colleagues to discuss critical patient care information. This was slowing time of discharge for my patients and contributing to poorer health outcomes for them,” Dhar replies.

“Seratis shows you on a real-time basis who else is looking after your patient (taking into account shift changes) and enables you to message them securely using your mobile phone and bypassing the pager.”

Auckland achievements

While in Auckland, Dhar served as Vice President of the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association while studying Doctor of Medicine at the University of Auckland between 2005 and 2009. During that time, she undertook policy work to combat the problem of “doctor drain”, which was later adopted by the New Zealand Government.

Dhar believes that technology can be used to enhance medical services further in the near future.

“Technology is only just starting to penetrate health care. We'll be seeing some massive shifts such as robots helping take care of elderly or having all your data in one place and having it help you predict what will help improve your health,” she says.