India’s telemedicine market, which 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. The Global telemedicine market is worth more than $10 billion. Dhruv Suyamprakasam, founder of iCliniq, realized the potential of such a huge market opportunity and came with his unique initiative named iCliniq in 2012.
The idea was born out of a personal requirement that Dhruv, the Founder & CEO of iCliniq, experienced after struggling to find a doctor due to geographical constraints. Dhruv realized the existing untapped potential of bridging doctors and patients together by removing geographical barriers and thus founded iCliniq to fill this gap in the market.
Dhruv launched first iCliniq bot on Telegram, a messenger app in July 2015 and second iCliniq bot on Slack, the world's fastest growing enterprise app in December 2015. The bots on telegram and slack turned out to be the first online doctor consultation bots on the respective bots.
The brand is the first healthcare company in India to have made a healthcare bot on any platform. With the help of the iCliniq bot, users can send their health issues with pictures and medical reports to doctors, any time.
This healthcare initiative believes that the best outcomes happen when doctors ask the right questions and therefore the company has set up a moderation team that guides doctors to ask right questions by adding systems and processes in place that is constantly monitored.
In a candid interaction with BWdisrupt team, Dhruv talked about iCliniq in detail.USPWe have built a ‘quality assurance team’ which is a team of doctors that designs the process of 'asking the right questions' and constantly assists the doctors in "asking the right questions to the patients". With the help of iCliniq bot, users can send their health issues with pictures and medical reports to doctors, any time. It has a moderation team to ensure quality doctor consultation and avoid error in diagnosis. Moderation team guides doctors to ask right questions by adding systems and processes, and constantly monitors it to maintain high quality in the consultations on the platform which is at par with in-person consultations. iCliniq’s doctor panel consists of medical doctors, physicians and therapists from US, UK, UAE, India, Singapore and Germany.
Traction DetailsThe startup is having a user base of 1,45,000 patients, 1,200 doctors in 80+ specialties from 160 countries.
Funding Status We are self sufficient as of now. Dr. Madhan, a leading surgical gastroenterologist who was earlier associated as Co-Founder of iCliniq invests in iCliniq on a regular basis. We have identified a team with senior people who have been CXO's of top companies to join our US operations. We are confident that we are capable of handling scale. We also feel it’s the right time to raise investment as we are confident that we can put the money to great use in building a meaningful business. We intend to raise $5 million in 3-6 months.
Future PlansWe are planning to use artificial intelligence in healthcare which would help doctors answer patient’s queries much faster and in turn would bring down the cost of doctor consultations drastically and make healthcare affordable to all. We want to raise money to build this. When this is done, it will be much more comprehensive and smarter than IBM Watson. We have already started work on this in an incremental way.
Marketing PlansWe are planning to scale up in the Indian markets and also maintain and scale our international operations at the same time.
Challenges FacedHealthcare is really slow and it takes at least 3 times longer time and 5 times more effort to create an online healthcare company. Of course, lighter fields like nutritionists and wearables are faster. But online healthcare needs the right processes and checks. It took us a long research of interacting with 3000 patients.
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This is Meghna Shukla. She lives in Delhi. She is an engineering graduate and currently pursuing MBA from Jaypee Business School. She has a work experience of 2 years in content development. She loves to read and write.
