‘Technology can bridge the skill gap in healthcare’
India has its set of challenges when it comes to providing quality healthcare. But HealthAssure has leveraged a centralised technology platform, web & mobile applications, and its expansive network to make preventive care services accessible, available & affordable.
In an interview with BW CIO, Ninad Raje, Director & CIO, HealthAssure speaks about the challenges his company faced and how he leveraged technology to bridge the healthcare gaps in India.
Ninad is a Healthcare, Insurance, Information Technology and Financial Services senior professional with in depth knowledge and experience in successfully leading large organizations. He is a specialist in successfully growing organizations at a minimum rate of 5x using extreme innovation.
Ninad is also an active member of CII.
Q. What are the challenges that you faced in a country like India, where healthcare is largely unorganized?
Healthcare is not straightforward like other industries, where one can go ahead and build aggregators, marketplaces, etc and leave it open to vendors for listing and servicing individuals. Regulations, workflows, service quality levels, etc are more complex and nuanced, and that has been a bit of a challenge for us. Though the industry so far has been very active in pharma space, the delivery side of the market is highly fragmented and unorganised with the presence of a lot of mom-and-pop diagnostics and hospitals. Healthcare delivery constitutes 65 per cent of the overall market. The opportunity for us is to aggregate the smaller facilities, which we are working towards actively.
Q. In what ways can IT help bridge the existing Healthcare gaps in our country?
India has a strong presence in IT, which has been making inroads into the healthcare sector in India over the last decade; the advent of startups in the last three to four years has created an interesting dynamics in the market. Technologies such as telemedicine and video consultation are great tools that aim to bridge the gap between patients and doctors, especially in rural parts of India. Also, since the Indian consumer is more aware and connected to the Internet, the healthcare ecosystem, too, is evolving to match this growing expectation.
Another aspect where technology can play a crucial role is bridging the skill gap in healthcare. India is struggling to provide the adequate number of trained healthcare professionals, especially physicians, medical laboratory professionals, nurses, paramedics as well as technologists. Making doctors more digitally oriented and helping them use technology in their day to day discussions can help to solve this problem to a large extent. Moreover, technology enables doctors to connect with one another to discuss patient cases and view their medical history. Many such apps have come up recently that aim to build a secure network for medical professionals to collaborate and solve a case in a better and more efficient way.
Q. How has technology adoption impacted your operations?
Technology has already been an enabler in bringing healthcare services and solutions closer to the end user. The transition for the healthcare industry to this extent has already kicked off. Driven by the rise of new technologies, healthcare is moving from hospitals and clinics to homes and communities. From smartphones to social media to sensors, new tools have started empowering consumers with more information and control over their healthcare decisions. This increasing urbanisation, more awareness and onset of lifestyle diseases has led to a real consumer need for preventative and wellness services, that is apparent in both health delivery and health services, providing a great impetus to our organization. For Tier 3 and 4 cities, there is a big gap on almost all fronts – most importantly access to health. With the right technology and connectivity, we see some green shoots for health access to this segment of population.
For years now, Technology has been considered as an enabler. However, Technology is no longer just an enabler, it is a ‘driver’ & ‘disruptor’. There are several disruptive technology innovations being introduced daily, that are changing the way we live today. From the basic day-to-day rituals to the most challenging & complicated tasks, technology has a solution & answers to all.
Q. How does HealthAssure leverage technology to empower patients?
HealthAssure is a ‘Network Based Product Company’ focused on providing flexible solutions to the ‘Primary Care’ segment within the healthcare eco-system. We provide aggregation services within this space including widespread access coupled with huge discounts. One of our primary objectives is to focus on providing preventive care services, which are ‘Accessible, Available & Affordable’. We can deliver this due to our unique proposition of providing a widespread, quality medical network across 850+ cities in India. This is made possible through our centralized technology platform ‘mPower’, which is an advanced & feature-rich app enabling anytime, anywhere medical appointment scheduling and tracking. Also, we leverage the power of technology, to create web and mobile applications for our customers. This helps us to provide intuitive services based on their requirements and get access to the highest quality network and medical facility closest to them. We have recently launched a-first-of-its-kind Employee Health Benefit product, which is both unique & innovative, and focuses on providing day-to-day Primary Care access to Corporates; from SMEs to largest MNCs.
I consider Technology as the single-most revolution that has propelled HealthAssure to newer heights. At HealthAssure, we always believed in harnessing the power of technology to seamlessly scale our operations. Additionally, we believe in technology-led innovation to drive customer focused quality & operations focused productivity & efficiency.
We recently embarked upon our journey of embracing digital technology & self-service driven mobility. This has helped us immensely in all aspects of our business including productivity & efficiency improvement, achieving customer delight, delivering quality services, reducing cost, increasing revenues etc.
We have recently launched our technology driven and highly acclaimed ‘HealthPass’ & 'mPower' products, which are advanced & feature rich apps enabling anytime, anywhere access to available, affordable & quality healthcare. These innovative products have proved to be highly successful technology implementations and have been adopted by our customers with aplomb and high degree of utilization. This has not only led to customer satisfaction, but has helped our organization to reduce costs by 25-30%.
Additionally, we implemented an entirely integrated workflow enabled technology platform with high degree of automation which has resulted in tremendous productivity & efficiency gains combined with considerable cost reduction.
Q. How has HealthAssure grown as a business since its inception?
We have invested millions into building HealthAssure, and are happy to report that we have doubled each year over the last 5 years and currently are servicing 15-20K+ customers per month. Besides having a first mover advantage in an extremely un-standardized primary care services environment that exists now, we have further focused on building quality medical network in 850+ cities. Our strategy as a technology-focused company has allowed us to be the only company with an integrated IT platform connecting 2,500+ primary care centres across India managed through centralized operations providing standardized delivery with higher quality.
Moreover, we have started additional verticals catering to Insurance Underwriting and have launched our most unique & innovative product ‘HealthPass’ catering to day-2-day healthcare needs of customers. These verticals have already scaled up in to large lines of businesses for us.
Having started our India operations initially with 1 office in Mumbai, we now have offices in Gurgaon, Bangalore, Chennai & Hyderabad and expanding further. We service almost all insurance companies in India and large corporate MNCs.
