| Sweta Mangal |
India is a country with the highest number of road traffic accidents. As per WHO by 2020 it will be the diabetes capital of the world. Almost 57 per cent of India’s land mass is vulnerable to earthquakes, 68 per cent to drought, 8 per cent to cyclones, and 12 per cent to floods. Additionally, the ratio of traffic accidents per 1000 vehicles is 21.3 times higher than the world average. 30 per cent of accident victims in India die due to delays in transportation to medical facilities. The above facts indicated that India lacked good EMS ambulance services. The existing system is terribly fragmented and does not meet demand. Some ambulance services are free, while others are not. These ambulances are often unavailable on a regular basis, are in poor condition and do not have appropriate medical equipment or trained paramedics.
Ziqitza Healthcare Limited (ZHL) was founded in 2005 with the mission of providing emergency medical services to all Indian citizens. To date we have served 16,00,000 people across India by providing emergency healthcare services mainly in the form of our network of 860 ambulances and organised numerous emergency camps and workshops to increase emergency response awareness The innovation in our business strategy lies in the emphasis placed on our mission that no one should be denied the right to use our services based on economic status. For this we have introduced a tier pricing model providing high quality medical care at subsidised rates or free to our customers. With substantial success in our private business we observed the poor quality and efficiencies of ambulances run by the government. We took the opportunity to correct this market inefficiency through a new business strategy, Dial 108 is a government funded privately run service where we began offering state governments the option to privatise their ambulance. We have expanded to 860 ambulances all over India today with this initiative. Another key innovation in our service offering to identifying and filling the gap of ambulances for private hospitals using our ambulance outsourcing service.
– Sweta Mangal, CEO, Ziqitza Healthcare