Harish Pillai, COO, Indus Health Plus in an interaction with Prathiba Raju, urges the need of PPP in NCDs and informs that it would help to curb the burden of these diseases in the country
What is the status of preventive healthcare in India? How Indus Health Plus cater to this?
The country shoulders a big burden when it comes to non – communicable disease (NCD) as one in four Indians is a potential cardiac patient, one in ten is a diabetic and we are third largest in the cancer. When Indus Health Plus started its programme in 2000 it focused on 35 plus age group and thought they would be prone to NCDs like cardiac arrest and diabetes, but to our surprise the age group from 28 to 32 are prone to cardiac arrest, diabetes which are preventable. Hypertension and unhealthy lifestyle are the main reason for the diseases. Every hospital, every diagnostic centre was catering to corporate and executive set-ups, so Indus Health Plus started a agent model with eight agents as of now it has 85,000 agents across 17 states and 78 cities in 122 hospitals and diagnostic centres.
Is your presence in pan India?
In the retail mass model, we have a strong presence in Western and Central India, while in southern part of India, we are placed in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. In Tamil Nadu, we have started the retail mass model only a year ago in Chennai, but through our corporate programme, we have a good presence in the districts like Salem, Trichy and South Yercaud.
What is your experience working in metros, tier I and tier II cities?
Our growth in tier-I and tier-II cities are much better than the metros. This is because we have highly discounted product and our prices are 50 per cent less than the market prices, so patients commonly in tier-I and tier-II cities see more value for money. Moreover, these developing cities only have few super speciality hospitals. When they see a product which is already heavily discounted, they adopt much easily. It is not that metro cities are not opting for it but the adoption rate is more in tier-I and tier-II cities comparatively.
With the highly discounted rates how do you mange to earn profit?
It’s a global phenomena that everybody loves a good discount. When we were looking for pricing of our product, we had combined all the factors viz radiology, technology. Apart from it, we have noticed that people are also missing the personalised attention of the doctors, so we offer a customised preventive master package. The packages cost nearly one third or even lower as compared to many hospitals. We also have our Indus Health Plus team in hospital who help the patients during and after the treatment. Besides, offering discounted rates also gives us the benefit of large volumes.
What are your expansion plans geographically?
Indus Health Plus has six lakh clients in 2016 and now our target is to reach around ten lakh clients by 2018. Already, we have our presence in the UAE and now we are trying to get into other Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries like Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and few African countries. We are concentrating on these regions as they are also the countries witnessing high burden of cardiac arrest, diabetes and cancer and the government there are looking for bringing those NCD numbers down. Though our basic model remains the same, we have tweaked our programme as per each countries needs.
As mentioned, we have both retail and corporate programme. In retail programme, we are already present in 17 states and hope to be in at least 25 states by 2018. Currently, in corporate programme, we are present in 24 states.
- In-house call centre
- Health check-ups, report generation and doctor’s consultation in a single day
- Live doctor chat service to enable the availability of doctors consultation
- Health Friend card takes care of medical and hospitalisation expenses
What was your turnover in the current fiscal?
The turnover for the current fiscal was Rs 100 crore and we hope to reach Rs 400 crore by 2020. The challenge of turnover is always there because our price is heavily discounted. Our focus is to reach to more people and help them in NCDs, which is easily preventable.
When it comes to NCD, what are your expectations from our government?
We don’t have large scale detection programme on preventive healthcare. We are working with many other countries where the governments proactively come forward and give us the opportunity to work with government hospitals. But, in India, health is a state subject, therefore the central government should set out a strong policy document which should encourage PPP in NCDs. The government should need to come out with active NCD action programme, so the pandemic diseases can be controlled.
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