LetsMD: Enabling EMI for Surgeries
LetsMD is a New Delhi-based healthcare fintech start-up that aims to make healthcare accessible and affordable to 50% of India’s population that can't access tertiary-level care due to unavailability of immediate liquidity. Through LetsMD, a user can compare hospitals, look at doctor videos, compare pricing for their surgery and book an appointment at the hospital of their choice. It then gives the user an option of converting their surgery bill into an EMI at low interest.
Nivesh Khandelwal, Founder of LetsMD, was running his family's healthcare business for a few years, running a chain of IVF centres in North India. While doing that, he realized that there are two major problems in the healthcare sector. First is discoverability. His parents ran a hospital in Delhi for the last four decades. The hospital has conducted about 55000 deliveries and 50000 gynaecology surgeries. However, it never got any patients from outside Delhi, whereas a Fortis Hospital which opened two years ago and costs twice as much gets a lot of patients from outside Delhi. Next is financing. 50% of Indians can't access tertiary level healthcare due to lack of immediate funds. 30% of urban Indians and 70% of rural Indians take loans to fund medical expenses. Half of these people take loans from loan sharks at exorbitant interest rates and only a very small % actually go to banks. This is because banks don't have a medical loan product and only disburse personal loans which take a lot of time to originate. Medical loans need a faster turnaround time and such a product is non-existent in India. It was the above lacunae that inspired him to start LetsMD.
Initial biggest challenge was to get hospitals to agree to display indicative pricing for various procedures. Large hospitals agreed but the smaller ones were wary of sharing pricing as they did not have packages. He then ran a pilot with a few hospitals that agreed initially and got a tremendous response. He then took the results of the pilot to the hospitals that did not agree initially and then most hospitals came on board.
Funding
He along with his cofounders bootstrapped when they did the pilot. Once the pilot results were available they set out to raise external funds. Recently they closed a USD 750K angel round from a clutch of prominent angel investors like Calcutta Angels, Waterbridge Ventures, Anupam Mittal. The capital is being used to develop the technology and scale up the team. Its initial focus is Delhi NCR and 30 elective surgeries
The company went live last month. It is building its team and has hired 20 people across technology, biz dev and conversion. The aim is to facilitate about 5000 surgeries in its first year with a gross value of INR 50 crores.
Expansion plan
LetsMD’s focus for the first 12 months has been to establish itself in Delhi NCR. Its focus is on 40 elective surgeries and it hopes to cover 80% of the tertiary care infrastructure in every city it targets. 80% of India's tertiary health hospitals are in 20 cities and it will cover these 20 cities over the next three years and expand the surgery basket to a 100 elective procedures.
