Spryance to up investment to $14 mn

Spryance Inc, a medical transcription (MT) services provider to the health information management (HIM) market, plans to increase its investment in India from the present $8 million to $14 million.

The investment will go into augmenting its present infrastructure and technology, setting up a third quality assurance (QA) facility and increasing its employee base from 1,200 to 2,200 by the end of this year.

Its QA facilities are currently located at Pune and Chennai, where it employs 250 quality assurance personnel and the rest of the 950 employees are home-based MT professionals.

"In the next phase, we will be involved in directly marketing to end user hospitals in the US. Earlier, we used to work with channel partners. There is a sizeable gap between demand and supply (for MT outsourcing) and the population of the people who are doing this work is ageing," said Raj Malhotra, CEO and president. It will use the services of its 10-member sales force to directly sell to the hospitals in the US.

More than 60 per cent of the 950-strong home-based workforce that Spryance employs at present reside in tier two and three cities.

Besides the increase in headcount, Spryance will concentrate on increasing the productivity of its medical transcriptionists through guidance from QA personnel, offer career growth opportunities and training fresh graduates.

The compensation for these MTs is dependent on their productivity or the number of minutes they transcribe. On an average an MT transcribes 30 minutes worth of data in a day, which can go as high at 100 minutes per day. This would earn an MT between Rs 6,000 and Rs 14,000 at the entry level per month.

Spryance's first two rounds of funding of $8 million came from World Bank's private investment arm, International Finance Corporation.

Beecken Petty and O'Keefe and Company has made the latest third round of funding of $6 million, which will be used for the expansion in India and for acquisitions.

BPOC is a US-based VC firm with expertise in healthcare services. It typically scales up its investments to about $15 to $20 million over time in the companies that it is funding.

The size of the MT industry in the US is $12 billion, while the Indian industry is worth $110 million. Nasscom estimates that the MT industry will become the fourth largest contributor to foreign exchange reserves in five years.