RIL's Nowfloats forays into tele-medicine, looks to on-board 1 lakh doctors

Reliance Industries-owned Nowfloats on Wednesday announced its foray into tele-medicine vertical with initial target to bring 1 lakh doctors on board in the next 3-4 months.

The company will gradually expand to other tele-medicine ecosystems like e-pharmacy, health check-ups and healthcare related service.

"We have on boarded 6,000 doctors who can provide consultation to patients over online video. Patients will not need to download a separate app for accessing doctors. They will get a link from the doctor on Whatsapp or any other messaging platform that can be accessed in a browser," Nowfloats head of research, Nikhil Salkar told PTI.

He said that the company has developed technology that can enable a doctor to provide online consultation in nine minutes.

"Patients can search for doctors online. We have search engine optimisation embedded in the website that we develop for doctors which will show them based on their ratings," Salkar said.

The company will charge doctors Rs 1,000 onwards per month for the service and Rs 10,000 onwards for online video consulting service.

"We have 50,000 SMEs on our platform which includes 6,000 doctors. Out of this around 26,000 are paying annual subscription fees. Now we will start pushing for paid service," Salkar said.

He said that Nowfloats will start expansion of the technology after 1 lakh doctors come on board because then it will have an idea of size and scale of services required to facilitate the tele-medicine.