India’s emergency care system has many challenges. According to a study published in the Journal of Global Health, India has the same universal emergency care problem of overcrowding.
Moreover, in India, there is no specific ambulance and often times it takes more than 45 minutes. Meanwhile, the scenario in rural regions of the country is even more grim.
In 2016, RED.Health was founded as StanPlus to provide accessible, reliable, and high-quality medical assistance to those in need. With over 5000 ambulances and a strong presence in more than 550 cities, the company aims to provide high-quality medical response within the reach of patients.
In June this year, Red.Health partnered with Fortis Hospitals to provide end-to-end emergency services in Delhi-NCR region. In conversation with Financial Express.com, Prabhdeep Singh, Founder & CEO RED.Health talked about his services model, upcoming business plans and goals among others. Excerpts:
What is your service model at the moment? How does it work, and how this collaboration will benefit your existing Model?
We want to create India’s 911…it’s a network called 911 Like the model in which most hospitals are part of the network…patients call a number. And nearby hospitals respond in that usual way. But today, because we are a private healthcare market, what happens is that every hospital wants their response system to be extremely well done…emergency patients are very critical for a hospital. But more importantly, it is core to the service model that hospitals have…you want to save a life, right? And unfortunately, in India, there are 1000s of numbers. All those numbers are, unfortunately, not answered very well. So an average hospital in India takes about 14 to 15 minutes to send an ambulance away from its gate. Now the big question that I want to ask you is, why should an ambulance be parked inside the hospital? It doesn’t make any sense. So what we are able to do is we are able to create a very Uber-like technical platform that when a patient calls the nearest ambulance is dispatched, picks up the patient, and takes the patient to the right Fortis hospital. That’s what we’ve been able to do now for about 70 large hospitals in the country.
Recently revamped yourself and rebranded yourself from Stanplus. And you recently also launched air ambulances, how that has been going, and what are your upcoming plans?
So the reason we rebranded from Stanplus to red health is that about 40 percent of the patients call us direct. And, you know, we are becoming increasingly a direct-to-consumer brand. And red ambulances have a very deep resonance in every city we serve as the number one ambulance brand. So what we’ve been able to do by rebranding is actually become closer to our patients. And as patients, reach direct our hospital partners benefit, because they get more patients through our system. And at the same time, you know, the big problem we are solving is only 14 percent of Indians in emergency actually call or get a qualified provider. 86 percent of people just take personal transport, I mean, just think of it yourself.
If there’s an emergency at your home, the likelihood of you trusting your own personal transport or Uber is much higher than waiting for an ambulance to arrive right? So we believe that if you answer a call quickly, you give multiple reassurances if you send a tracking link, and then word of mouth spreads, and people start using ambulances. So this 14% number as it goes up to 30% or 35%. India wins, there is no way that India will be able to manage 300 million people about the age of 60 by 2031, without having a qualified emergency system. And it cannot be government based only because there are so many private hospitals in the country. So we are creating a system that works very well within hospitals, as an independent red ambulance system with employers with insurance so that we are able to create a very accomplished 911 system in the country. And we offer red ambulances as part of the red air ambulances already or red guardians as we call them as part of the service. And honestly, in every city that we’ve launched a guardian, we’ve quickly gone on to become the number one brand because we come as an integrated bed-to-bed. Just to give you an example let’s say that there is a patient now that has to come from Kolkata hospital to Fortis by common happens every day. Now that the hospital has assessed the partner, we have Fotis has us as a partner, and then we have an in so for a patient they don’t change hands, they don’t change the brand. It’s completely seamless and does it.
What are your upcoming business plans and goals how you’re planning to achieve them in the current financial year?
We’re very focused this year and our AOP is very well defined. We are going to go after the largest hospital chains in the country like Fortis. And we are happy that the year started off strongly they are also partnered with Apollo and we are about to launch Apollo Air across the country. At the same time, we have an employer business that is fairly large, and we will do 3x that number.
In recent years, there has been a lot of emphasis on public-private partnership. Do you think that it will be feasible in emergency services?
Absolutely, we’ve seen a lot of nonambulance operators running government ambulance services, and more and more governments are starting to engage with us and vice versa, we are engaging with these governments, state governments, or even at a municipality level, highway level, railway level, right, or BSU level. We believe that the way forward is PPP and the government is actively encouraging folks like us who are in the private space to come and build it with them. Whether it is hardware skillware or software. And we are we remain extremely interested and eager to work with governments across the states to redefine how they deliver emergency services to the citizens
It’s been seven years since red dot health has been in the market. And I just want to understand what are the critical aspects of your journey so far? And what are the challenges that you faced? And how do you turn these challenges into opportunities?
So when we started…the problem remains we truly believe that the government needs to start looking at, you know, quality accreditation for ambulance operators and ambulances in the country. We have NABH for hospitals and NABH labs, but unfortunately, there is no regulation or standardizing accreditation that good operators…quality operators like us can, can qualify for. And it’s high time because this market is very large, very fragmented. It is important that from a patient’s point of view, patients know who to trust and who not to trust. Not all ambulance operators are alike. So having a government’s regulations and standards will help. That’s point number one. Point number two on a critical aspect is we’re very, very glad that hospitals now are partnering with folks like us to outsource or have someone else manage their emergency response.
If you’re a direct-to-consumer brand today, you naturally partner with the likes of delivery, or another delivery partner, you believe that your job is creating and marketing that product. But someone else can do the logistics for you. Hospitals today are also starting to trust independent agencies, and independent partners, to manage patient transportation for them, whether it is on the surface or whether it is on air and Red Health is the largest player, we are the category lead. And we are going to get larger and larger because at the core of it, hospitals know that we are a trust-worthy operator and the initial challenge was that hospitals were not trusting an independent agency to do this for them. But today, most of the hospitals we know are aggressively and actively choosing to let someone else run this way.
You recently launched air ambulances, what is the scope and potential of air ambulances in India? So in a country where you know, the out-of-pocket expenditure is still very, very high. How do you see this particular segment growing?
You’re right, the penetration of your ambulances in India is really low. It’s really, really low. Having said that, it’s increasing. And we believe that as insurances start covering air ambulances in the country, and government comes with helicopter policy, a helicopter emergency response policy, it’s going to further get the impetus to become a much-needed service. The big question is, do we need it? Yes, India is a largely rural country. So connecting rural patients to urban centers is super important. At the same time, look at our traffic, we are congested, right? If I have to go from one hospital to another or a critical care hospital, I will get stuck in traffic for sure. At the same time, it’s also about access and awareness. Do we have enough air ambulances in the country…we don’t these are charter planes masquerading as clear ambulances, we need dedicated air ambulances in the country, and right in the very near future, we’ll be putting our air ambulances on the ground and in the sky, the next step is awareness.
We need to tell people the services available, the services affordable, and the services insurance covered. So we are working across the spectrum, both on the supply side and on the demand side to make sure that more people know that they have access to it and then more people are able to afford it. And then also encourage patients to ask their doctors about their ambulance options.
