The critical pillar in the healthcare industry are doctors and any digital service focused on their needs to take two things into account. It has to be a spam free environment and provide knowledge enhancing kind of platform within their community. Focused on bringing the doctors to the online world, Curofy, the Gurgaon-based based digital healthcare startup has received a robust response for its app targeted at these medical professionals. The fundamental principle is very clear for Curofy: bring a peer-to-peer connection among doctors so that it can
improve their efficiency.
“Our mission is to make doctors more efficient everyday and whatever we build will add value to them. Think of it like a personal assistant,” says Nipun Goyal, co-founder, Curofy. Founded by three IIT Delhi graduates—Pawan Gupta, Mudit Vijayvergiya and Nipun Goyal, they always had the passion to do something of their own. The
trio brainstormed over what would be the best area to get into and they zeroed in on healthcare and education.
“We met a lot of stakeholders and found out that doctors are not willing to be part of the digital network,” says Goyal.
The reasons being: doctors do not have enough time, want to see only relevant things when they come to the digital world and largely interact within their community. Curofy realised that if they could customise and give them a platform which is relevant and exclusive, it would be a draw for the doctors. What started as getting a doctor on their app in February, 2015 for every five days, has now touched a dizzying figure of 800-900 daily.
Curofy has become the platform for doctors to connect among themselves and also share information, basically patient cases. The app, which used have two to three cases shared a day, has now reached 300 daily.
According to Goyal, there are certain characteristics of a doctor: they need a good set of patients, knowledge and reputation. “Curofy is solving the second and third need,” he says.
Among the registered medical professionals in India, it is estimated that around 85% of them are running their own practice or part of a smaller nursing homes. Unlike the larger hospitals, these doctors have the need of interacting with others of their community and do not have much of a support system. It is in this space that Curofy provides the relevant information and connect.
However, Curofy is very clear that the privacy of doctors is not breached as the discussion on the patient cases does not reveal any personal information. Goyal says, “Any kind of advice or help the doctors require, Curofy will be the network which will provide the services.”
Curofy today has more than 1.13 lakh doctors on their app with connects in over 600 cities. For this digital healthcare startup, the big chunk of their revenues is coming from the medical devices companies who provide targetted services for the doctors besides the pharmaceutical firms. Goyal says they already have around 12% of the doctors in India on their platform and the target is to reach 60% by 2018. Further, they will also go take their model to the
international markets.
