Government Alone Cannot Invest In Telemedicine Space

While an engineering student in Jaipur, Ayush Mishra met with a grisly road accident. It set in train a chain of events that would lead him to set up Tattvan E-Clinic (with Ranga Sudhakar, once of Apollo). But back in 2007, doctors in Bareilly, his hometown, gave him little chance of survival unless he was taken to Delhi. “Luckily, my father had a cousin who had just started interning at Apollo Indraprastha, and he connected my father to a surgeon at Apollo, over telephone,” recalls Mishra. “Now, that was a teleconsultation that was happening, between my father and the surgeon, and my father just had to follow his advice.” More than a decade on, Mishra’s telemedicine retail startup is helping fill a gap in Indian healthcare. The first clinic came up in Bareilly, in July 2018, and this was followed (through a franchise) by centres in Kashipur, Pilibhit, Dehradun and Saharanpur. Tattvan has plans for another 1,000 centres in India in the next 36 months, to come up via its Smart Clinic franchise model (it also, incidentally, has a presence in Afghanistan and Iraq).

Looking for funds (& structure)

We are trying to bridge the gap between ‘fancy’ telemedicine technology and the physical structure that healthcare needs, and that can happen only through telemedicine. But, a lot of investment, and a lot of private players, need to come into this space. The government alone cannot do it – it is spending Rs. 3,000 crores a year, setting up rural health centres that are to be run by telemedicine. But it’s all very unstructured; you need private players to make it a more organised sector, to start setting up clinics.

The promise of quality diagnosis

Our MoU with corporate hospitals is very straightforward. It says they’re going to give their best doctors to us through telemedicine. For example, if a doctor in Medanta does a face-to-face OPD for a fee of Rs. 1,500, the same doctor will do a tele-OPD (teleconsultation OPD) at a Tattvan clinic for Rs. 600. Apart from telemedicine OPDs, we also get these doctors to do face-to-face OPDs once or twice a month. Patients in Tier-II and Tier-III cities can now come directly to our clinics and speak to the best doctors in the country.

A countrywide network

We want to create clusters first. So, we developed the Delhi-NCR cluster, where we signed MoUs with hospitals, got together doctors and made them care partners and then started setting up clinics within a periphery of 300kms, 400kms and 500kms from Delhi-NCR, and connecting them to Delhi. The Haryana belt is remaining, otherwise we have covered Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Now we’re going down south, where we’re creating the Hyderabad cluster, and in the west the Mumbai cluster. Next, we want to do Indore and Lucknow. Once all these clusters are done, we’re going to connect all of them together, so it becomes a network of brick-and-mortar telemedicine clinics.

Changing the healthcare game

I don’t think there is any challenge for growth of telemedicine in the country because patients want it, doctors want to do it, and the government wants it to be done. But, right now, we are not offering patients too many services because we feel this may not go well with the current legal structure. The moment telemedicine is regulated, it is going to change the entire landscape – healthcare is going to cost much less after regulations are brought in.-Times Of India