Doctor Swift

When Anoop Sharma was diagnosed with viral fever last July, he first-hand experienced how sluggish the whole system was. There was no one-stop solution for primary healthcare needs, he says, which prompted him to set up Dr. Bean with Ramakrishna Subanna and Ashwyn Sreekantaswamy in November 2015.

Struggling with an ailment, you don’t want to wait long hours or even days for appointments. Dr. Bean’s app, Sharma says, helps patients find doctors in their locality and book appointments in less than 15 minutes. The benefit though comes at a cost, with the company charging Rs.50-100 from patients depending on the practitioner. It is also planning to charge an annual Rs.5,000 from the doctors, shares Subanna.

When it comes to medicine delivery and diagnostics, too, expediency is the buzzword for the healthcare start-up. For deliveries, users can just upload the prescription on the website or the app, and get doorstep delivery for a charge of Rs.45. To avoid discrepancies here, the prescriptions are checked by both Dr. Bean's in-house team and the pharmacy. “From the vendors’ end, medicines will be dispensed only if the prescription is in place, not otherwise," explains Subanna. The same goes for diagnostics, with the start-up helping schedule scans and collecting samples from home.

"We follow a patient-centric healthcare model. Now, we have 50 medicine delivery clinics, about 10 diagnostic centers and 4,000 doctors in Bangalore on board,” says Sharma, pegging the company’s revenue at Rs. 18-19 lakh.

The start-up says it sees 500-1,000 transactions per month, with the average ticket size at Rs.1,000 and a conversion rate of 5-10%. With 10,000 downloads so far, Dr. Bean is now planning to expand its services to Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kerala. “Our plan is to reach out to as many people we can. We are finding ways to take this model to the rural areas, where internet and mobile connectivity is still an issue,” ends Subanna.