Outlook-Healthcare industry

Since the pandemic, the primary healthcare sector is being relooked at with the realization that tertiary care is not enough to manage the disease burden, along with the renewed awareness on disease prevention. As per the report by Bain & Co., affordability, access, and quality are all pressing needs for India’s healthcare system, and one of the key factors to achieving this is investing in a strong primary care backbone. With rapid and unplanned urbanization, India’s urban population has increased to 450 million and is expected to reach 583 million by 2032. Most rely on private healthcare that is fragmented and unorganized.

The Indian primary care market is worth USD 15 billion to USD 20 billion, but it is largely unorganized with general practitioners at the center point, who provide only consultations. Despite this, patients’ expectations of primary care clinics are evolving.

The role of medical clinics in improving India’s healthcare system
Of the many learnings from the pandemic, the importance of a neighborhood clinic and a family physician has been reemphasized. Patients are rushing to super-specialized doctors for minor ailments and eventually redirected to other specialists, adding to cost, efforts, and time for both the patient and the doctors. Medical clinics offer professional medical care for individuals, based on a locality or community, before shifting them to more advanced hospital-based care

This is why Apollo Clinic, Apollo Dental, and Apollo Sugar Clinics have been started to provide quality primary healthcare with facilities like home sample collection, online reports, screening of non-communicable diseases, and medicine delivery.

How Apollo Clinic, Apollo Dental, and Apollo Sugar are positioned
Apollo Clinic offers a wide range of medical services with Apollo’s trusted expertise and excellence. Established in 2002 with the aim to deliver quality healthcare of international standards to neighborhoods, Apollo Clinic now has over 400 centers across the country. It is an integrated multi-specialty clinic that offers specialist consultation, diagnostics, preventive health checks, and pharmacy, all under one roof. Bringing the clinical expertise closer to the community, it is also reviving the family physician program, where there is one point of contact for a family’s healthcare needs. The clinics also give emphasis in raising awareness about non-communicable diseases (NCD) via education initiatives and activation camps, aiming to nurturing a healthy community.

Apollo Sugar was established in 2015 with a vision to help people manage diabetes in the best possible way. The value propositions combine the curative care delivery and preventive care around lifestyle and hardware trackers of health. It has 90 centers across 21 cities. We are constantly innovating in the diabetes care management process.

Apollo Dental is an integrated multi-specialty dental clinic that offers state-of-the-art facilities, expert dentists, one of the best-in-class technologies, as well as trained technicians and support staff. It is equipped to handle any dental medical eventuality across 110 centers in 23 cities.

Growth and expansion plans
Apollo Clinic is expanding its footprint with multiple models, taking quality healthcare closer to community. It is also providing value-added services with innovative products like Niramai – a thermal breast cancer screening tool, point-of-care testing like tele-ECG, blood sugar, and cholesterol checks, Swaasa AI – a screening tool for lung health assessment, and Neuro Equilibrium Vertigo Clinics, to name a few.

Apollo Sugar Clinic’s vision is to be the largest and most preferred diabetes care provider across India while continuing to improve medical outcomes for patients. They would be expanding network exponentially in the coming years to achieve this by signing up new models and formats. Apollo Sugar also partners with doctors to open up specialized diabetes care clinics in neighborhood.

Apollo Dental has launched a contactless AI-based oral hygiene analysis program that can be done through WhatsApp. Patients can receive an instant report of their dental/oral issues within 2–3 minutes of their interaction via WhatsApp. These reports will be verified by an Apollo Dental expert, and patients are advised on whether further treatments would be required, through a telephonic interaction. This is a convenient way to keep oral health in check, and enables more people to take dental health seriously. Apollo Dental is also partnering with dentists to start more clinics in multiple neighborhoods.