Why does it take so long to see a doctor in his clinic or in the hospital? Many among us are often frustrated that we make an appointment for a certain time, we arrive on time, yet we are kept in the waiting room for too long a time before we meet the doctor. The answer to why we are kept in the waiting room for so long might be governed by different scenarios, however, thanks to technology, seeing a doctor online can save patients a lot in time and convenience. An innovative health startup, called Eclinic 24/7, is leveraging modern technology to offer consultation with doctors over voice/video calls from the comfort and privacy of a patient’s home. In other words, it making sure that “the doctor is always in.”
Jeyandran Venugopal, founder & CEO of Eclinic 24/7, a Bengaluru-based health startup, tells FE: “We have done several thousand consultations already over voice/video/chat/email across a variety of specialities ranging from general physicians to specialists to counsellors for emotional wellness issues. We have also been recognised as one of the top 50 emerging tech startups in the country by Nasscom (via the Nasscom Emerge 50 Award 2015). This validation by a jury panel of the top captains of industry and well-known consumer internet stalwarts has been a tremendous encouragement for us and also a validation of the potential of this sector as a whole.”
Without doubt, healthcare is going to be the next frontier of hyper growth. Jey emphasises that healthcare is a fundamental human need and it is therefore a recession-proof industry. “The robust growth in GDP in the country and the increased discretionary spending power across every strata of the society has resulted in the growth of this industry at 16.5% YoY and it is expected to be a $280 billion industry by 2020. Also, the secular shift we have seen in every traditional industry (commerce, media, travel etc) to the digital economy has not yet begun to take shape in the healthcare industry and it is inevitably going to happen.”
According to Jey, 70-80% of primary care illnesses for which people visit the ER or a physician’s office can be effectively triaged and treated by telemedicine. “Given this, we believe that in a few years’ time a majority of primary care consultations will be done remotely.”
Origin of the idea
Adversity does not always symbolise pain or difficulty. If one looks at the brighter side it can actually prompt a person to think out-of-the-box and come up with an innovative solution. This saying is apt for Eclinic 24/7, which was born when Jey faced some health difficulties with his son (routine childhood stomach upset ailments) and had to drive to the ER of a hospital several times and end up waiting for a long time to be subsequently seen only by a junior resident. “I wished that there was an app for pediatric urgent care where you could reach doctors immediately over a video chat for getting instant help when needed,” he says.
“My research into the on-call doctor service started there but soon I realised several other customer segments who would value the experience of consulting a doctor from the comfort and privacy of their home. Mobility-challenged individuals like the elderly are another example. Also, busy individuals who did not have the time to book doctor appointments for a physician visit, drive in traffic and wait for an indeterminate amount of time instead ended up ignoring their health concerns due to these hassles. Thus realising the larger demand across several of these customer segments, the idea transformed into a full-fledged primary care platform,” says the founder of this health startup.
Jey started his career as a software engineer with Amazon.com in Seattle as one of its early employees and architected, built and managed several of their core e-commerce platforms. “I got the opportunity to be a part of the founding team of Amazon in India and came in 2004 to setup and grow the software development centre here,” he informs.
Jey has experience leading large global technology teams and has worked on domains ranging from e-commerce, payments platforms, search technologies, cloud infrastructure services and several other consumer platforms. “I decided to continue in India both for personal reasons as well as because I realised that India is going to be one of the biggest consumer internet markets in the world.”
Subsequently, Jey joined Yahoo’s R&D centre as a director of their search engineering team and eventually grew to be a global vice-president managing an engineering division and also a part of the leadership team in India, managing the centre. “All this while, the seeds of entrepreneurship were growing in my mind and when I found an idea which had an equal measure of social impact and business potential, I jumped into it.”
Consult a doctor instantly Eclinic 24/7 has been seeing phenomenal growth at over 60% month over month since the startup launched its Android app. Jey says that his venture has helped patients from several far flung reaches of the country by connecting them on-demand with some of the top doctors in the country.
Basically Eclinic’s product is a telemedicine platform. Through its mobile apps or the web, you can connect with doctors for a video consult, voice call, chat or email/web-based consults. It has a cloud based electronic health record (EHR) platform that underlies the consultation experience and integrates the latest standards in clinical data storage and retrieval. It also supports medicine delivery in several cities, plus easy laboratory tests.
On the financial performance and funding, Jey says, “We have early revenues from our B2B programmes (corporate employee wellness initiative) as well as our direct consumer (B2C) channel via consultations and also through our partnership with a leading pathology lab through whom we offer the convenience of home pickup of samples for our customers along with the benefit of deeply discounted rates for lab tests.” He adds: “Our focus has been on growing our consumer base, adoption and engagement. We have received funding of half a million dollars (R3.2 crore) from one of the largest corporate conglomerates as a strategic investment.”
According to Jey, there is a growing realisation now among investors about the potential of this area. “We are starting to see several investments in this sector from angels, marquee names such as Ratan Tata as well as many top tier venture capitalists in the country.”
A few final words. Eclinic’s vision is to make healthcare more accessible, affordable and higher quality by leveraging technology. “Telemedicine is the only way by which we can efficiently deliver healthcare to every remote corner of this vast country. It is a major problem we have taken on and it is still early days for not just us, but everyone in this industry. So, we can’t yet say that we have made a visible difference yet in the ecosystem. But, the seeds of change have been sown and I have no doubt that in the years to come, technology enabled startups such as ours will form a core part of the healthcare delivery infrastructure in the country,” he summarises.
