This Yelp-like app in India can make sure your mom’s health is in good hands

If you have a smartphone and live in one of India’s bigger cities, chances are all you have to do to find a physician for an appointment is to look at your phone. From Practo to SeeDoc, there are a number of startups available to help you book an appointment with a doctor, including video consultations.

Ravi Shankar Mishra was worried about the quality of these doctors and their clinics when his mother needed a checkup during a visit with him in Bangalore. Because Bangalore was a big city, Ravi assumed it would be easy to find good options. What he found, though, was that there was no uniform way to get recommendations. People largely operated on word of mouth.

“People had to figure out on their own where to go,” he explains. He decided that wasn’t good enough. “We wanted trust in [India’s] healthcare ecosystem.”

Many appointment booking apps came with reviews and ratings, but Ravi figured if the clinics were getting business through the app – or giving the app a portion of its profits – then they couldn’t be completely objective.

“We don’t take money from doctors and hospitals. We don’t do appointment bookings. We don’t do online consultations,” Ravi tells Tech in Asia. Instead, Medinfi is more like a Yelp for healthcare.

Ravi had previously worked for Amazon, Jabong, and Tata Administrative Services, but he had known for a long time that he wanted to start his own company. He decided to look into the problem with his wife Himani, also an Amazon employee. Together, they co-founded Medinfi, an Android app that shows how close a doctor is to a user and providing objective, detailed information about each physician, hospital, and clinic.

Step-by-step

Users can input where they are and what type of care they want. Then, GPS will locate nearby healthcare practices along with reviews. Medinfi uses a three-step process to verify and rate practices. First, it sends people from its 15- to 20-person-strong ground team – about half of the company’s total – to collect data from the healthcare establishment. They note the physical location, down to latitude and longitude, and research the medical professionals’ experience, education, fees, and contact information.

From there, the data goes through Medinfi’s partnered insurance companies – they’ve partnered up with five Indian health insurance companies through a model called Voice of Insured – to get patient reviews.

Finally, Medinfi has partnered with the Indian government and the Insurance Information Bureau of India (IIB) to gain access to the Registry of Network Hospitals in India (ROHINI), which in turn gives them a wider reach for clinics. If users find clinics or physicians not listed on the app, they can suggest them to begin the vetting process. Ravi says 10 percent of the establishments on the app were first suggested by users, and health centers on the app get re-verified every month.

Medinfi currently has 40,000 active users. It gets a portion of the cost savings from the insurance companies – about 15 to 20 percent – and also gains revenue through advertising and partnerships with diagnostics services. It is present in Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad, Noida, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Kolkata, and has 12,000 clinics’ information. It plans to expand to 40 cities by March next year.

Help for Mom and Dad