Mumbai-based primary healthcare services company HealthAssure that specializes in network-based products, especially for corporates, is working as an enabler between the corporates and hospitals as well as healthcare insurance service providers.
Varun Gera, founder and CEO of HealthAssure, a management graduate from Notre Dame University, talked to BW Businessworld about the market gap for primary healthcare services and corporate employees.
Why would any corporate go for HealthAssure? HealthAssure provides corporates access for its employees to a wide and deep network of primary care medical delivery within 5 km of any location in 800 cities in India. This access constitutes varied needs for an employee viz pathology, diagnostics, GP consultation, specialist consultation, pharmacy, nutritionist, counseling, dental, ophthal.
Our medical network comprises of highest quality centers with the best brands in the market like SRL, Apollo clinics, HealthSpring, Lucid, Precision, Vijaya Diagnostics, Suburban Diagnostics, Spectrum, etc. HealthAssure's unique IT platform allows for a seamless Web-based access for all employees and corporates to our network and quality checked medical reports. Currently we have partnered with over 2,000 primary care centres across India in order to bring healthcare closer to the end user at unparalleled competitive costs.
Why do you prefer corporates for your platform? The corporates are a very large market of over 50 million employees. Also this market is ready for evolved employee health benefits over that of individual market. Apart from corporates we also work with most of the most major insurers in the country to provide primary care services to their end users, especially in the pre-policy stage.
Is it difficult for you to manage individual client?With our almost automated access and delivery to customers, it’s fairly easy to manage individual clients. For now, focusing on corporate market is high impact and our focus remains new product developments to cater to this largely untapped market.
How many corporates do you have on board as well as hospitals? We have a network of more than 2,000-plus primary care centres in our partner network and we provide services to 75-plus corporate.
What is the revenue sharing model of HealthAssure? We are an aggregator of primary care medical delivery providing access and discount to our customers. Our revenue model is retaining part of the discount we get from our medical network.
Will you vie for another round of funding and how are you going to utilise that money?We are in process of raising our Series A round and would be utilizing the funds on IT, Medical network building and customer acquisition.
What are your expectations from the market? With increased disposable incomes, increased cost of healthcare and onset of lifestyle ailments, there is a very large unmet demand for health services. We expect the market size to be at least over 50 million customers and aim to get 3 million customers over the next 5 years.
What have you kept in the pipeline? We are currently doubling our customer base each year and plan to launch many products focused on primary care for various segments of the market viz corporates, SMEs and specific consumer segments.
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Haider Ali Khan is an alumnus of IIMC. He holds a degree in English Journalism from the prestigious campus. His passion includes Aviation, Technology, Politics and Sports.