Indian healthcare is an untapped sector which recent startups and other corporates are moving towards for expansion, especially ordering and disbursing medicines. Online pharmacies are not limited to just pharmacies but have evolved into virtual clinics that offer various services along with an overall diagnosis of a particular patient. We have enlisted a bunch of organizations who are making their presence felt in these new waters and are transforming digital healthcare.
Practo
Practo Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is a healthcare information technology provider based in Bengaluru, India. Practo works as a search engine for doctors or clinics, booking medical appointments, consultations, insurance, health records storage, and medicine delivery through its mobile applications and website for patients.
Shashank ND and Abhinav Lal, both NIT alumnus, founded Practo in May 2008. The idea for Practo was born in early 2008, when Shashank ND was unable to access enough information about the doctor before his father was about to undergo surgery. The difficulty of scanning through the medical records and lack of access to proper information urged them to build a network which would work as a bridge between health professionals and patients.
It was a step-by-step evolution for Practo. They first started out with launching Practo Ray, which is a cloud-based practice management software that helps doctors and clinics manage digitisation and make their practice more efficient. Practo received a major push when Sequoia Capital invested $4 million in the venture in 2012. With this investment, they changed aim to reach 100,000 doctors and 50 million patients in the next three years.
Practo lets patients enquire about health problems by filling the required information that does not include any personal details of the user. Patients can search for doctors, clinics and hospitals and laboratories at any location. The patient can avail consultations with doctors online. The platform ensures a response to every query, failing which results in a refund. Ordering of medicines is another service from Practo that saves patients the pain of running to different pharmacies, asking for their medicine. Practo has health articles on almost every health problem which is informative on various health and nutrition topics.
As of today, Practo has over 100,000 doctors listed from over 310 Indian towns and cities, with comprehensive coverage from metros like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Singapore. It has 30,000 appointments booked every month, and the platform is currently catering to 25 million patients every year, with traffic growing at 24% per month. Practo has definitely heralded digital transformation in healthcare.
LiveHealth
LiveHealth, headquartered in Pune, was founded by Abhimanyu Bhosale and Mukund Malani in November 2013. It works as a management information system (MIS) for healthcare providers. It makes
every step of the healthcare process smarter, from collecting samples to diagnosing patients and generating reports by optimising and analysing patient information.
The USP of this platform is that it revolves around the patient. When the patient decides to do some diagnostic tests with one of the 135 health providers LiveHealth has tied up with, the system registers the patient with the provider and generates a unique barcode for the sample and also tracks the status of the sample along with collecting results directly from medical instruments in the lab.
This health tech startup has raised $1.1 Million from Nexus Venture Partners in 2018 in a seed round, which it has used in expanding its presence across the country. The platform has already digitised more than 72 Million medical records and is delivering over 50,000 digital medical records to doctors and patients every day making forays into healthcare innovation.
Ask Apollo
Apollo built ‘Ask Apollo’ to connect billions of patients to Asia’s most advanced healthcare network via video, voice call, and email for interacting with doctors at distant. Patients can explain their symptoms to the doctor face-to-face enabling the latter to prescribe treatment. The idea here is to provide patients with timely access to the right doctors. This is a most welcome innovation in digital healthcare.
Ask Apollo is a virtual consultation service from Apollo Hospitals. It is a patient-centric service that gives patients the freedom to consult a doctor at their convenience from anywhere, anytime.
Lybrate
Lybrate was born in July 2013 when the founders, Saurabh Arora and Rahul Narang, noticed that there is a dearth of knowledge when it comes to making a decision on how to avail proper treatment for ailments, and self-medication makes things more complicated. The app works to solve these problems and make medical services more easily accessible to Indians.
The founders built an app and website-based health tech company. The application is essentially a medium to connect patients with doctors instantly. You can book appointments with doctors in the directory after looking at their profiles and specialties.
Along with Lybrate, they have launched another app called Lybrate+ which is an online lab testing service. Through this, the samples can be collected from patients from their home and then be taken to the diagnostic lab to get tested, the reports get delivered to the patient digitally on the Lybrate+ app and website.
The company registered a 125.82% hike in revenue from operations to Rs 42.78 crore in FY19 against Rs 18.71 crore in FY18, revealed filings with the MCA. The future does look promising for this online doctor appointment and pathology collection platform.
1Mg
1mg was founded by Prashant Tandon, Gaurav Agarwal, and Vikas Chauhan in 2013. The startup has three business verticals — pharmaceuticals, labs, and doctors. The platform had more than 70 million unique patients from across India accessing its platform last year for these three services, with over 2.5 billion annual page views for the healthcare content, which is also a vital aspect of online pharmacies.
They have built an online platform that provides consultation services with qualified and registered doctors on chat for free. Ordering medicines and health products online, booking lab tests online, home sample collection services and providing reports online on the app, are a few of the services 1mg provides. 1MG has raised $45.4 million in a funding round held between December 2018 and March 2019.
The online sale of drugs in India is valued at approximately INR 2,000 Crore. The figures released by the Union Health Ministry show that this is less than 0.5% of the current retail pharmacy market space. This also indicates the untapped opportunity the e-pharma startups can scale up to in the near future. With the Indian government rooting for the digitization of the economy, and with consumers getting comfortable with online payments, the e-pharma sector has all the reasons to continue scaling and fulfilling any healthcare needs of the consumer.
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