India has been making a niche when it comes to low cost healthcare facility as it is currently seeing an influx of healthcare related tourism in India. The same could not be said about the online healthcare portals as they were too nascent in terms of size & users but all that seems to be changing now.
The online healthcare segment in India has seen players like healthizen, wellinformed , Healthcare magic. Accel Partners recently invested around $2.5 million in Healthcare Magic while Healthizen was served with $1 million in funding.
India currently has very low healthcare facilities (hospital beds per person) compared to western countries but due to onslaught of insurance growth healthcare industry is witnessing a stupendous rise in similar fashion to education sector.
Online Healthcare Segment could be divided into:
E-Medical records:
Online portals or tech companies maintain the health records of patients which could easily be transferred to doctors and hospitals as per requirement of patients.
Companies like YosCare Technologies already provides smart card solutions in India that easily allows transferring of medical history to patient’s hospital.
Health related advice:
This segment majorly consists of sites and blog network which handles health related tips & advice. They also have forums for users to ask their questions on.
Online Healthcare solutions:
The service portals help users in finding medical help online instead of visiting doctor for some small cases. Some services even lists doctors’ info and their medical record along with setting up appointment with doctor.
The E – medical records and online healthcare solutions are the highly profitable segments as they could attract subscription revenues.
Online health-care businesses requires tie-ups with insurance companies to attract high volume business growth. Healthcare magic has tie-up with ICICI Lombard whereas Healthizen has tie-up with Royal Sundaram. Insurance companies in turn find it cheaper to outsource record keeping and health advisory work to these companies.
