Even a year back, could you imagine that your healthy lifestyle could extend to the virtual world? GOQii’s recent partnership with Animoca Brands is striving to make that a reality. The ‘GOQii Health Metaverse’ is designed to empower players in the virtual as well as the physical world; the metaverse ecosystem will be powered by a unique virtual token program, the Token. Company founder & CEO, Vishal Gondal, spoke to Sudhir Chowdhary on how GOQii aims to bring metaverse in the preventive healthcare space.

How is metaverse reshaping the preventive healthcare domain?

Covid-19 pandemic has made people understand themselves, their body and their health and ask the right questions to stay healthy. Technology has already led to a paradigm shift in the healthcare industry from a ‘sick-care’ model to a preventive or wellness-based model. There is no greater wealth than good health and in the long term, preventive healthcare is the only viable, long term, mass market solution.

While the pandemic has helped healthcare go digital, it has also increased the income disparities among sections of society. The rich have become richer and the poor poorer, thereby having a negative effect on people’s health. Digital healthcare backed by technology plays a pivotal role in delivering value-based care across the healthcare spectrum around the world. Adaptive intelligent solutions can help lower the barriers between hospitals and patients, improving access to healthcare services and enhancing overall patient satisfaction, particularly in smaller towns and cities.

What will be GOQii’s contribution to it?

GOQii’s philosophy is built on the belief that harmony between mental and physical well-being is the key to living a long and successful life and GOQii aims to help everyone to unlock this potential and become healthier versions of themselves.

Currently, people are not motivated or incentivised as much to make a life change; open metaverse can change this. GOQii, in association with Animoca Brands, is launching the ‘GOQii Health Metaverse’ to empower players in the virtual as well as the physical world. GOQii will do this by incentivising by providing tokens or rewards for adopting a healthy lifestyle. GOQii is setting up a framework for being healthy to earn universal health tokens. The future superpowers will not be countries with the largest army and weapons but those with healthy populations. This is the vision behind GOQii Health Metaverse.

Digital health is now getting a boost with blockchain technology and Web3, a new kind of internet service that is built using decentralised ledgers. Blockchain holds the potential to revolutionise healthcare. With its full deployment, patients can be the centre of focus for all operations, which in turn will also be entirely overhauled with better security, privacy and accessibility. Blockchain can be applied to the medical space in a variety of ways, leading to immensely reduced costs and new ways for patients to access healthcare.

GOQii is working with various Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain technology solutions. Apart from building and integrating a blockchain platform, we will be building a healthcare specific NFT marketplace.

How will the innovation of metaverse in the healthcare industry benefit the consumers?

In the health metaverse, healthcare professionals will be able to deliver more collaborative treatment programmes, not hindered by the current siloed nature of the existing healthcare system. It will also benefit in terms of swift information sharing between doctors and clinicians and that means that underlying causes of ill health could more quickly be established. Monitoring of patient activity in the metaverse means factors such as compliance could be tracked more easily, which would further assist with diagnosing and treating illness.

Apart from your metaverse initiative, what else is GOQii working towards in the preventive health-tech space?

We believe preventive healthcare is the only viable, long-term, mass-market solution. With this vision, GOQii is focussing on digital therapeutics. It recently launched the first of its kind integrated lifestyle medicine programme—GOQii Diabetes Care for people diagnosed with diabetes. GOQii also aims to partner with companies to launch insurance-based products and services. Insurance is something that we are currently working on.