healthi is Indian digital preventive health startup, empowering its users to make smart choices about their health so that they can avoid chronic illnesses. The company, which has been serving users since April 2014, was founded by Rekuram Varadharaj (RV) and Krishna Ulagaratchagan and who are alumni of top global MBA programmes at INSEAD (France and Singapore) and Stanford (US) respectively.
As with most innovations, healthi was born out of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Co-founder Krishna’s family has a history of heart disease and high blood pressure, a common occurrence amongst India’s population. Anxious about whether he would suffer the same fate, Krishna diligently invested in health check-ups every year. He grew increasingly frustrated that the outcome of his health tests was a report that was unintelligible to people like him. In conversations with his friend (and later, co-founder) RV, he found that this dilemma was not an exception. RV too had gone through his share of routine annual health check-ups. Since he had always considered himself to be reasonably fit, leading a healthy lifestyle (vegetarian, non-smoker, etc.), RV was taken aback when some of his results were not as rosy as he had assumed. With timely information, he thought that he would have taken appropriate steps to prepare and much sooner. In this age of technology and predictive analytics, surely there had to be a better way to empower people to seek personalized help ahead of time! This was how healthi was born.
Today, healthi is a one-stop digital preventive health guide providing access to the best practitioners and raising awareness on the prevention and management of lifestyle diseases. With healthi, the user embarks on a personalized and comprehensive preventive health journey, which begins with a health check-up. healthi helps users choose the most suitable packages available at leading providers. It provides easy-to-understand and comprehensive reports to clearly translate the results for the user, so that they may seek expert help and guidance from practitioners and specialists after understanding their health status.
Business success thus far Since inception, healthi has marked noteworthy milestones. The startup has grown 9x year-over-year in the first two years of operations and matched its second-year performance in just one quarter in the next year. The company boasts of having facilitated more than 10 lakh tests with an over 95% user satisfaction rating and over 90% customer retention. healthi counts among its partners reputed healthcare industry and research leaders. For its health check offering, it has tied up with most of the leading diagnostic and imaging laboratories, clinics, and hospitals in India, thus offering 500+ high-quality venue options for users. It has made significant strides within a short span of time and now serves users in over 130 Indian cities.
A cut above the resthealthi has a research partnership with the Government of India on the efficacy of chronic disease prediction models. It also has a content partnership with Mayo Clinic to deliver personalized, clinically validated, and relevant preventive health content to users. It has developed scientifically validated Intellectual Property (IP) around chronic disease risk prediction models and analytics. healthi has used such predictive analytics, personalization algorithms and machine learning models to improve healthcare outcomes for employees in many leading companies in India. The same big data models and predictive analytics have been used as a foundation to personalize a health check from among 9.7 million options. Thus, combining scientifically validated predictive analytics, machine learning technology, user-friendly design, strong partnerships with healthcare majors and cutting-edge research, healthi is revolutionizing the preventive healthcare market.
healthi has a 40-member team comprising experts from universities such as Oxford University, University of Michigan, UCSF, ISB, IISc, IIT, and REC. Its medical board is headed by former Asia medical director of Sanofi-Aventis. Apart from this, the venture has also partnered with leading healthcare brands and diagnostic labs making the service the best in the industry.
Opportunity and future outlook According to a recent report by FICCI, the wellness and preventive health care sector as a whole is expected to nearly double by 2020. healthi aims to be the go-to smart personalized preventive health service for the digital Indian. The company plans to empower 1.5 million users to make smart choices about their health by 2018.
To do so, it is ramping up its engagement with companies who invest on behalf of their employees and will also be reaching out to users directly through digital and select offline channels. healthi also intends to double down on its research partnerships to improve efficacy of chronic disease prediction and management in India. Outputs from research and product development would build on healthi’s personalized and easy-to-understand approach to preventive health, thus further empowering users to make healthy lifestyle choices.
