Reimagining Elective Surgeries

The elective surgery market in India is worth USD 30 billion. However, 90 per cent of this market is unorganised, which means the hospitals, doctors and insurance players are not connected in a single interface. The 10 per cent organised market revolves around big hospitals like Apollo, Max, Fortis, Medanta, etc. However, these hospitals make up just around 400 out of 44,000 hospitals in the private domain. Moreover, they are restricted to metros, which leaves many Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities without the right kind of hospitals and surgeons. 

Glamyo Health, a multi-specialty healthcare provider, is delivering elective surgeries and attempts to bridge this disparity between metros and Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities by working with individual hospitals in these cities to provide quality elective surgeries. Glamyo Health is reimagining India's elective surgery space by using the underutilised infrastructure capacity of both hospitals and surgeons. It handholds the patient throughout their journey, right from discovery to discharge and the post-operative follow up.

Archit Garg, Co-founder, Glamyo Health, says, "As a platform, our primary role is to handhold the patient throughout their journey when it comes to elective surgeries. Affordability is another aspect. We don't compromise on the quality of the surgeon, but we are able to work with a distributed infrastructure due to which we are able to reduce the cost by 25-30 per cent."

Business in Blood

Coming from a business family, Garg always aspired to be a business owner. After graduating from Oxford, he worked with organisations like Deutsche Bank, Milestone Religare and Rabo Equity, where he invested in seven firms. Out of these seven firms, four became market leaders in their respective segments. With experience in building various companies at the board level, he decided to start his business in the healthcare domain. He conceptualised Glamyo Health to address the issues revolving around India's extensive elective surgeries market.

On the other hand, Glamyo Health's other co-founder, Preet Pal Thakur, was a practising clinician. He then worked as an investment banker with a bulge bracket investment bank. He then donned the role of a private equity / venture capital investor for nearly ten years which helped him understand the nuances of healthcare in India from very close quarters. 

Come mid-2019, Thakur started actively exploring ideas and options for his entrepreneurial venture as the realisation that private equity funds are materialised in a ten-year cycle kicked in. "I thought that one successful startup can create disproportionate impact for all the stakeholders, and that's how Glamyo Health came up," he states.

Clinical Outcomes Key

Thakur states that being closely associated with the healthcare ecosystem, it was clear to him that the long-term moat in any healthcare service delivery business can come only from excellent clinical outcomes. 

From the beginning, according to Thakur, they started building the business with the patients and clinical outcomes. "It was slow, tough and costly to do, but it has helped us stand out both in net promoter score (70) and clinical outcomes – better than some larger hospitals. This has helped Glamyo Health create a solid foundation as we scale faster to touch one million lives," says Thakur.

The company has raised USD 6 million to date and works on a fixed revenue share model with the hospitals and surgeons, and earns money on every surgery it does. Garg describes finding the right set of employees as a challenge. "Today, we have a team of 80-plus medical coordinators but finding the right set of trained employees was a challenge for us," says Garg.

Glamyo is now looking to increase its presence in nearly 50 cities and expand its hospital network to more than 1,000 hospitals and over 500 surgeons.