AlternaCare Plans to Take Telemedicine Services to South Asian & Middle East Markets
BWDisrupt interacted with Abhishek Dwivedi, Co-founder of AlternaCare, which was founded in January 2016 and is based out of New Delhi.
Excerpts from the interview:
How does your startup work?
AlternaCare is a simple yet innovative telemedicine platform where anyone
can get medical consultation with reputed doctors over a phone call instantly or on a scheduled basis. It is followed by relevant prescriptions in the form of SMS & Emails. All they need to do is to call on 888-26-44444 anytime and can speak to the relevant doctors available all time for their health problems. Alternatively, people can request an instant call back on www.alterna.care/request-
After the consultation, the patients can also opt for home delivery of medicine or blood/urine/stool/etc sample collection from their home..
Currently, AlternaCare is known for it's world class doctor panel in Homeopathy, Allopathy, Ayurveda and Psychology consultations. AlternaCare charges a nominal fee of Rs 200 for telephonic consultation. The payment can be done through mobile balance or online or even cash pick up is possible across 4000 pin codes PAN India. Moreover, the patients can also video chat with our doctors on our website anytime 24X7.
How did the idea came to start?
The Indian healthcare ecosystem is highly broken and a lot of startups are revolving around the solution of the same. No startup is giving the personal hand holding to the patients while connecting to the doctors. This, we saw a big opportunity to be in.
What are the special key features of your startup?
a) Highly secure and private platform to discuss any type of medical issues.
b) No wallet dependency/credit or debit card dependency to pay for the fees
c) no need to travel too far for the treatment
d) medicine delivery @ home.
e) diagnostic lab tests @ home
f) all this without downloading any app and works even without the internet by dialing the number 888-26-444-44
g) a 24X7 personal healthcare assistant for proper handholding of the patients. In short, one stop solution for all your medical hassles.
How are you different from the existing ones?
a) We are the only healthcare product which can work with or without the internet in holistic healthcare..
b) Confirmed consultations with the doctors with 0 waiting time
c) Highly economic
d) personal handholding to provide a world class medical treatment
How much amount of funding your startup raised till now? If not, then what's your future plans of funding?
AlternaCare raised Seed Funding - $500K from Eros Labs.
How do you monetise?
AlternaCare charges Rs 200 for doctor consultations and MRP of medicines plus delivery charges to provide the same at home within no time.
What are the challenges your startup faced while setting up the business?
To convince patients to talk to doctors over call as they never heard anything of this sort before.
What is the market size and market opportunity?
Our market size is the amalgamation of India’s telemedicine, pharma, diagnostic labs, hospital referrals & medical data analytics market. The telemedicine market in India alone has been growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 20 per cent, holds the potential to cross $ 32 million mark by 2020 from the current level of over $ 15 million, according to an Assocham’s recent study. Indian pharma sector alone will touch $45 billion by 2020. The Indian diagnostic market is estimated to touch $32 Billion by 2022. All this on one hand and the other side has more than 70% India that do not have access to quality healthcare even today.
What are the traction details?
We are doing more than 250 consultations a day and more than 50 follow-ups each day. More than 40K patients healed successful and more than 1 Lac enquiries received till date.
Future: Will be going to foreign markets starting with SEA then Middle East then Europe and America.
What advice you want to give the new entrants in this space?
Unlike other domains, healthcare is one domain where players whether app based or cloud telephony based are not competitors but facilitators for helping the market to grow.
