Democratising healthcare through technology
Bangalore headquartered health tech startup Clinikk Healthcare, leverages technology to make quality healthcare and financial protection accessible and affordable. It is also a leading player in the country to provide healthcare protection to blue collar workers and their families
Established in 2017, Clinikk Healthcare is one of the few startups which is working on the ground level and providing primary health care to the people who are in need. Powered by the latest developments in AI and diagnostics, Clinikk aims to offer affordable healthcare to 60 crore Indians lacking insurance coverage. It was founded by Dr Suraj Baliga and Bhavjot Kaur. Dr Baliga is an orthopedic surgeon, while Kaur is an IIT Roorkee alumna.
The startup has served over three lakh individuals till date, and is available in all major Indian cities. It has partnered with leading businesses such as Uber, Ola, and Swiggy to provide 360-degree healthcare coverage to their blue collar staff and families. “Clinikk was started as a teleconsultation and health advisory platform, but to fulfill comprehensive needs of the end subscribers, we later added financial risk protection as well in 2018,” says Dr Baliga, adding that the company became a pioneer in introducing pocket sized health benefits for gig economy workers with coverage starting as low as INR 100/month.
According to Dr Baliga, Clinikk is focused on serving the underserved and uninsured 600 million people who fall in the middle of the population pyramid, where the top 120 million consists of people having a personal health cover or one provided by their employer and the lower 650 million people who are covered through the Ayushman Bharat, ESIC, CGHS, etc, insurance schemes of the government. “Towards reaching our target segment we are working with prominent gig economy platforms,” he states, providing the list of services that Clinikk offers as part of its subscription:
- 24×7 access to a dedicated Health Assistant, who offers medical and insurance support in 11 Indian languages through app/website/phone.
- 24×7 access to a family doctor either on chat (app), voice or in-person visit. The doctor is well informed about the health data of the family, connected within 15 minutes of any medical need and provides prescription.
- Doorstep medicine delivery and hope sample pickup for diagnostic tests at discounted rates.
- Customised Health Insurance Plans according to every family’s needs.
- Hospitalisation guidance and support from Clinikk’s medical team.
- Access to cashless hospitalisation benefits in over 6000+ empanelled hospitals pan-India.
- Family health engagement.
“All these services are available in the vernacular language of the user (11 languages supported). These services can be availed either through our app or through our IVR service (for non smartphone users) to make it convenient for the users,” mentions Dr Baliga.
The Clinikk HealthVault allows consumers to keep a track of their treatment plan, view prescriptions and access all their medical records of the entire family in one place.
The startup is focusing on building a full-stack healthcare solution with technology as the focal point to facilitate all the interactions in the ecosystem. “The full-stack solution will help us gather the millions of data points that is helping us build a deep-tech system that would help our team of doctors and health assistants. This solution will leverage big data coming from various sources such as consultations, diagnostics and health records to guide the health assistants to collect more contextual info to enrich the machine learning model of the decision support system,” informs Dr Baliga, adding further that similarly, these data points can be used to suggest possible diagnosis to doctors. The result of the doctor’s decision would further enrich the model to suggest better. “We believe that this system, when used in conjunction with the National Health Stack, would provide a seamless experience to users along their healthcare journey,” he affirms.
Dr Baliga believes that there are many ways how artificial intelligence can make healthcare affordable:
- Identifying the onset of diseases early in their progression thereby reducing the unnecessary cost that might be incurred by going to a secondary or tertiary care unit.
- Improving patient care through improved accuracy of diagnosis through machine learning. This will reduce the cost of diagnosis that could be incurred due to wrong or faulty diagnosis.
- Accurate diagnosis, protocol based treatment, better outcomes.
Pointing out that the future of healthcare should be standardised and integrated end-to-end to provide a holistic healthcare experience to the user, Dr Baliga shares that in order to enable that they plan to introduce strategic initiatives, “We are seeing major uptake in our next target industries like transport and logistics and manufacturing. We would continue to grow in these industries. We would like to grow our user base to 1 million active lives by Dec 2020.”
He is of the view that regulations in healthtech and insurtech space and maintaining standard customer experience across different channels are some of the significant factors that have to be carefully monitored along the way.
