Policybazaar.com to enter healthcare space; to offer online consultation

As social security support on healthcare services front is either very limited or difficult to access for the general public, the venture aims to redefine the way India seeks quality medical services

ETechAces Marketing and Consulting Pvt. Ltd., which owns India's leading insurtech brand, PolicyBazaar.com and India's leading lending marketplace, PaisaBazaar.com, is now foraying into the healthcare tech and service space.

As part of its plans to capture the out of pocket healthcare market in India estimated at nearly $100 billion, the new venture will provide free online and over the phone medical consultations, to begin with. It aims to provide 1 million free medical consultations by March 2019 and reach the scale of 5 million by March 2020.

Given that social security support on healthcare services front is either very limited or difficult to access for the general public, the venture aims to redefine the way India seeks quality medical services, just like its parent company has done it for the insurance segment.

"Our vision is to change customer behaviour in the healthcare space by making the consumer shift to online medical consultation from offline by building an easy to use, convenient and trustworthy solution. We believe that healthcare space has huge potential to disrupt, and can follow the same growth trajectory as the digital insurance space which initially faced a similar kind of consumer inertia that this space faces," said Yashish Dahiya, Co-founder and CEO, PolicyBazaar Group of Companies.

India has one of the lowest ratios for a doctor per 1,000 people amongst the developing countries. Having a physical interaction with a medical practitioner is not only a time-consuming process but also an expensive one, especially in the private sector. Even though government hospitals and state-run health centres offer consultations either free of cost or at subsidised pricing, it's not easy to get an access to these services.

"We will be building a team of certified and quality medical professionals to give free online consultations to customers. This shall be supported by a robust offline network. AI will play a key role in helping us build this in scale and efficiency," said Dahiya.