In a country as vast and diverse as India, achieving fair access to healthcare presents a significant challenge. With a population of over 1.4 billion spread across urban centres and remote rural areas, the discrepancies in healthcare access are still very stark. While technology has offered solutions in many sectors, e.g. UPI /payments, weather forecasting, agriculture, commerce, communication etc; Healthcare, in spite of advanced technological innovations, ranging from telemedicine platforms to AI-powered diagnostics, has so far played a marginal role in democratizing healthcare access.
In the landscape of healthcare startups, a large number of ideas have provided solutions away from the traditional hospital/clinical service delivery. These have included various ventures engaged in clinic pharmacy distribution, health checkups, appointment management, Outpatient consultations etc., primarily targeting the outpatient departments. These ventures have predominantly embraced a business-to-consumer (B2C) approach, akin to other startups, with elevated customer acquisition costs and many of these models have struggled to gain significant traction/scale up significantly.
