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| Edited By: Ashish K Tiwari |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 21, 2018, 06:32 AM IST
The concept is pertinent to not only the Indian market but is a global opportunity both in the developing and the developed world. That's because if you look at the developing world, almost all of South America, Africa, South Asia (including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), rural China, South East Asia and Central Asia, all these places do not have access to reliable emergency medical response service. In fact, just about 750 million people living in the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand and a few other cities have reliable emergency services. The 911 service in the US works pretty well in the urban areas but in the rural areas the time lag can be anywhere from 50 minutes to an hour. And more importantly in markets like the US, the issue is not just the time it's also the cost because an ambulance transport can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000. That's pretty expensive for even for a middle-class American. And what is happening in a market like US is that health insurance is becoming more and more catastrophe linked. Insurance has high deductibles and a person has to pay from his / her pocket the first $2,000 to $5,000. So an ambulance transport can be actually a hit on a middle-class family. Thus, even in a developed market like the US, it (MUrgency) is an effective system for lower activity (non-life threatening) responses.
There is a volunteering service in Israel with whom we did a pilot. So right now it's a voluntary service and we are working with them to convert it into an emergency network. That's an extremely high efficiency system and you have to understand that, that kind of a volunteering commitment is not available around the world. It's very peculiar to few communities especially the Israeli community who's always under threat.
It is very simple. Imagine there is a medical emergency in a house, the normal reaction for any of us in India would be to call immediate family, friends, colleagues and family physician for assistance. The first few calls you make will actually take up 5-10 minutes. Here what we are saying is a tap on the phone and we will provide the response in less than 10 minutes. Just to give you a sense of how to make this opportunity sustainable, there are a couple of other things we are looking at offering as well. As a reference point, a billion people travelled outside their home country last year. Let's say you are going on an assignment to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Uganda, what safety net do you have or what connect do your family or friends have when you are outside India. In fact, that same is true even when you are travelling within India. Let's say we have 5,000 respondents in the state of Punjab and you are travelling there for some assignment. In case you face an emergency, our system will give you help and that too from verified healthcare professionals who have basic credentials to respond. And more importantly, through this application, your family and friends who are pre-registered are put in touch with that person so that they can handhold the medical assistance being given to you.
Yes, we've already launched in the Chandigarh tri-city area. We will be introducing the service in Amritsar and Jalandhar towards May-end and soon follow it up by launching in Ludhiana and rural Punjab. While the emergency service is fully active in the tri-city area and several features being offered, full integration hasn't happened yet. We are expecting that to be completed by June 30, 2016 across Punjab. One of the factors we selected Punjab for the pilot in India is because of high data plan and smartphone penetration there. Owing to sizeable expat population their ability to read and understand English is also high. The pilot in Punjab will help us tweak and fine tune the service and quickly roll it out across the country.
We have mapped the process in terms of difficulties people face in different geographies and cultures across the world, have understood what the gaps are and tried to make it available in the mobile phone. I've been often asked why the service is not available on feature phones. We understand feature phone is an important part today but three years down the line it will be less important. And we are not going to be present globally in this year. Subject to our ability to raise funds, it will take us at least 5-6 years to roll this out across the world. Accordingly, that will align with the roll-out of data phone across geographies. We are targeting to cover all of the India by mid-2018. In fact, during the recent fund-raising with Ratan N Tata, he made it a point saying the service should ideally be rolled out in India before it goes big globally.
We have seen the need of emergency medical response through some of the unfortunate events in Mumbai including the serial blasts and terror attack at Taj hotel. Our ambulances responded to those eventualities even before the police reached the site. And since we have only been in the service of life-support and not of transporting dead bodies, we know what the gaps / pain points are. One simple thing I'll tell you and this I'm sharing from my experience when I was working in Reliance. One of the most frequent requests that would come to me was please intervene with so and so hospital authorities and get a bed for relative / friend, etc. This is actually a huge pain point for anyone and everyone. Hence, depending on the emergency, we are also getting our responders to take the person to the hospital.
That feature is not available right now. We are coming out with that feature and it will be integrated with the MUrgency app. In fact, we are going a step beyond by also building a crowd-funding platform which is in fairly advanced stages for such interventions. So in case you see an accident or someone collapse, you will actually be able to trigger it and the healthcare professional will respond and, MUrgency will take the responsibility of paying that respondent using the money raised from the crowd-funding platform. It's basically a helping platform wherein anybody can alert a public incident and this would be one of the ways of taking care of the poor. That platform is being put together by a completely different entity and is under testing right now. We have already received approval for tax exemptions in the US and are now applying for tax exemptions in Europe and, will do so in India in the due course.
For the actual emergency response, the standard pricing is Rs 350 in Punjab wherein the healthcare professional will visit and stabilise the person. The price has been pegged in such a manner that it's attractive enough for the medical responder to make the effort while being affordable to a large percentage of the population in Punjab. I am not saying that this pricing will work in rural Bihar or rural Uttar Pradesh, but we believe 90% of the population in Punjab will be able to pay the standard fees of Rs 350. And after having responded to the emergency, if there is a need for the patient to be taken to a hospital for further treatment and an ambulance needs to be called, those charges will be over and above the standard fees.
Yes, we will have differential pricing according to the region for sure. There is another thing we are debating on but we don't have an answer to it yet. We had success in terms of differential pricing for the 1,298 ambulance service wherein we charged Rs 2,000 if the patient was taken to a private hospital and Rs 1,000 in the case of a public hospital. The pricing strategy was based on the destination and we easily managed it. Here we have not been able to figure out how to manage it but we are trying different options and like how we came with this logic for the ambulance service we should be able to take care of people who do not have the ability to pay.
The healthcare professionals registered on the network get 80% share of the standard charge of Rs 350. And to be clear, right now we are passing on 100% to them with the objective of stabilising the system and keep the motivation high level. While the agreement says there will be an 80:20 split, we are currently not taking the 20% and passing on the entire 100%.
The actual emergency response is algorithmic which means the back-end automatically handles it. However, we also have a 24/7 monitoring centre that has been designed keeping in mind that time is the essence of efficiency in an emergency response we have a monitoring centre being set up. It's a small one now but we have had the experience of running a 24/7 monitoring control room of up to 150 people for the ambulance service. In fact, we used to handle between 10,000 and 30,000 phone calls a day in places like Rajasthan and Punjab. So we have the management bandwidth and the experience of running fairly high-pressure monitoring centre. Just to give you an example, when you send out an alert, it reaches five respondents within two kilometers. If nobody among the five accept it within 45 seconds, the monitoring centre actually makes a call to them. Also, if the respondent accepts the emergency alert and hasn't started moving within a minute, then a follow-up call is made to the respondent.
Right now we have committed investments from Kris Gopalakrishnan, S D Shibulal and Ratan Tata. Additionally, we are in final conversations with a few more high-profile investors for another round of funding. There is tremendous interest in this venture because what they are seeing is that this is a potentially financially viable project but with a huge social impact. I am hoping that the discussion will get concluded in the next 90 day and we should successfully complete another round of fund raising.
We have pitched it as a pre-series A. The size of the investment is reasonable enough to fund our pilot and roll-out with sufficiently long runway so that we don't have to look stressed out thinking we are running out of money.
While it will take time globally what we have tried to do is build the financial model geography wise. So while the company itself may not become viable Punjab is taken as one unit and once we penetrate Punjab, we have modeled it in such a way that within 18 months Punjab becomes independently, financially viable. In short, there would be certain markets that will take more time to become financially and some will happen sooner.
