By Srinath Srinivasan
Visit Health, founded by Anurag Prasad and team, wants to be more than an aggregator in the healthcare and insurance space. Most platforms today offer insurance services only when a patient is hospitalised or in other words, when a patient is in the in-patient department (IPD). “Most of the primary care medical cases today fall under out-patient department (OPD). So, to tap into this market, we brought a new concept by providing insurance for OPD,” explains Prasad.
The startup has partnered with Acko and Apollo Munich Health Insurance for providing OPD insurance which is integrated into the app. Users can opt for OPD insurance by paying Rs 1,500-Rs 3000 depending on the case. The app also has a network of 50,000 doctors from whom out-patient consultation along with the insurance can be availed. “Once I have sold an OPD insurance to a user, the user spontaneously want to check with our services for consultations or lab tests before going to any other place the next time,” says Prasad. Being digital allows Visit Health to be cashless throughout and also enables users to have their medical history with reports in one place.
Apart from covering users for unlimited visits, the app offers immense discovery for doctors in its network without charging them anything. “The doctors are also getting integrated into corporate and insurance ecosystem through our platform. For instance, we are covering a roughly `100 crore corporate user base of Wipro. The doctors on our network can get access to that base and do not have to deal with insurance guys or Wipro officials,” tells Prasad. The app makes sure that the doctors’ fees are covered in a cashless way.
OPD business has been on reimbursement basis traditionally which has proven to be costly and was never digital – always dependent on cash with little to no data about users. Visit Health avoids reimbursements and collects various data points to work on its machine learning algorithms and come up with segment based pricing.
To acquire customers, the startup is burning cash and is not completely performance driven. “We initially thought we would end up burning 200-300% of our revenue. But today our loss ratio is at 140% and the revenue is close to Rs 3 crore,” says Prasad.
The startup has raised about Rs 10.5 crore from angel investors. With an average ticket size of Rs 3,500 per user per year, the addressable market for Visit Health stands at $5-6 billion, according to Prasad. It plans to sell 100,000 OPD insurance policies and collect a significant amount of data to expand into the market, in the coming quarters.
“The market poses a lot of challenges and the primary challenge for us is scaling—both with users and teams. We don’t want to end up serving a million users with just 40 people. We are mindful of that as we scale,”he ends.
