Tired of googling symptoms and getting a terrifying prognosis? This startup will help

Doctors’ Circle, incorporated in 2012 in Bangalore, initially started as an online platform for social media recommendations for doctors.

“It was designed to help the user receive reviews of doctors from their friends’ circle to help them choose the right doctor,” Dr. Sreya Gupta, co-founder and COO at Doctors’ Circle, tells Tech in Asia. But then, things took a turn.

Starting out

Before Doctors’ Circle, the company’s founder and CEO Satish Cheekala worked for Microsoft, but his entrepreneurial spark drove him to create something in the space he believes to be the most challenging in India: healthcare. A year after founding the startup, Cheekala was joined by co-founders Dr. Sreya Gupta and Shekhar Gupta to build the company.

As a part of marketing, the startup decided to shoot videos with doctors. Each video would have a doctor talking about a medical problem and it would span all spheres of healthcare. “As user engagement increased, there was a steady rise in the number of views the videos received, so Doctors’ Circle started focusing more on releasing videos solving health queries, [rather than] being just a place to discover doctors and book appointments,” says Satish Cheekala.

Every time a video is shot, the doctor is presented with a list of questions asked by users. The doctor then decides which questions to answer. The videos are two minutes long with solutions or quick tips. Then user activity is analyzed to find out which branch of healthcare requires more attention.

In India, the majority of video content available online is from doctors abroad. Doctors’ Circle believes the users in India will be able to relate better to the content if it is localized by Indian doctors. The startup launched a free app earlier this year that contains all its video content, categorized in terms of the different branches available: pregnancy, pediatrics, lifestyle, beauty, etc.

In this video, a cardiologist is briefly explaining the use of a implantable cardioverter defibrillator. It is a machine that is implanted in the patient’s heart to detect any uneven rhythm or heart rate.

A thousand videos and more

Although it started as a social review app, Doctors’ Circle has now produced 1,000 videos, shot with over a 100 different doctors. The app and website aggregated over 100,000 views in the first four months and it plans to add 500 videos every month to its content database. That may seem low, but views are currently growing at 30 percent per month. “We have over 15,000 users onboard and the user engagement on the website is growing at 40 percent a month,” says Cheekala. “The customers don’t entirely consist of individual users; doctors and hospitals have also subscribed our videos,” adds Dr. Gupta.

“We have about 500 downloads of the app since its launch and this is a good number in spite of no promotions or advertisements. For now, we are focusing completely building the content and hence, the product,” says Manu Srikumar, chief marketing officer at Doctors’ Circle. But the company is generating some revenue – it won’t say how much – from the doctors featured in its videos. They’re willing to pay to appear in a video and answer questions because the subsequent sharing of that video serves as a kind of promotion for their practice or hospital – everybody wins.

Going ahead