Telemedicine for your body and mind – this Indian app offers both

Photo credit: El Payo.

Like many healthtech startup founders, BITS Pilani grads Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Chetan Anand, and Shashvat Tripathi decided to found their company after witnessing the difficulty in accessing healthcare in India. They were on the BITS Pilani campus, located in a remote area, and swine flu hit the campus around the beginning of 2015. Students were worried not just that the sickness would affect their studies but also that getting treatment for anything beyond a general practitioner involved taking the day off and traveling to Delhi, the nearest large city. Going to see a general physician often involved long lines as well as a day off from work or class.

It may come as a small surprise, then, that their healthtech app Visit, which allows users to connect with doctors and specialists over mobile for consultations, got its start as a mental wellness app.

About 50 miillion Indians suffer from untreated mental illnesses in the country. Of those with non-severe cases, nine out of 10 go untreated. It’s those cases, the ones involving people in need of a little bit of counseling, that Visit’s co-founders wanted to help. But mental illness is also surrounded by stigma in the country.

“If anyone finds out about [someone seeing a therapist], people start forming opinions about it,” Anurag tells Tech in Asia. The co-founders thought it made for a good foundation – an app that connects users with a counselor they can speak to over the privacy of a mobile app. Since their ideal users wouldn’t be needing prescription medications from their counselors, they also thought it made for good testing grounds for the app.

Later, the Visit app expanded and now connects users with physicians, dermatologists, psychologists, and/or dieticians. Users can download the app get free access to Q, through which users can submit immediate concerns to a Whatsapp-like chat and get answers from doctors. If needed, patients wanting or needing a consultation can get connected to a doctor for an appointment via phone or video within 30 minutes.

“If you sign up on the visit app, we have allocated one doctor for you. You can text anything to them throughout the day,” explains Anurag.

Founded in February this year, Visit is currently available for Android and as a web app, and an iOS app will be released sometime in the future. Anurag says the app has about 4,000 active users and that 1,500 web consultations have taken place through it.

Doc on call

Visit’s co-founding team: (left to right) Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Chetan Anand and Shashvat Tripathi.

Upon download, users automatically get 60 days free access to Visit’s services, after which they have to invite a friend to get the app for an additional 30 days. The startup doesn’t charge for monthly usage at the moment, but it’s something the founders are considering for the future.

Physician or specialist consultations can range from US$6-12 per mobile visit, 80 percent of which goes to the medical professional and 20 percent of which is kept by Visit. Professionals on the app also have the option of inviting people who are already their clients to use the app. All the fees paid by those clients go to the physician or specialist in question. After the completed appointment, the patient continues to have access to their doctor for seven days for follow-up questions and communication.

Visit has 300 doctors and specialists on its portal, all of whom have been vetted to make sure they have the proper certifications to practice. The startup has a 10 point system, and besides verification, potential practitioners get points based on where they went to school and the hospital (if any) where they work. To make the grade for the app, they need to score 7.5 points out of 10.

“That doesn’t mean that the doctors we haven’t brought on board aren’t good,” says Anurag. Visit wants to keep its doctor numbers small at the moment to keep them proportional with their user numbers.

Visit’s competitors include SeeDoc, which also connects people with doctors via telemedicine, as well as lets them order their medications and labs over mobile (a feature that Visit plans to add soon). HealthEminds and Epsyclinic are mental health portals that help users get counseling.

A little goes a long way

A challenge that faces Visit, as well as other healthtech apps that involve doctors, is getting the doctors to sign up. In Anurag’s experience, the process resembled that of rolling a ball up a small hill – hard at first, then easier after a little momentum. The founders went into hospitals and private practices at first and struggled to meet with doctors, who, in some cases, thought they were pharmaceutical salesmen. That was challenging until they’d gotten around the first 20 to sign up. Then, Visit was able to move onto LinkedIn, using their partner doctors’ networks to get other specialists to sign on. Today, recruitment takes place entirely over LinkedIn.

Visit was incubated by MapMyIndia, from which it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding this month. The funding specifically will be used to build up Q into the healthcare assistant the founders want it to be, which may, in the future, end up implementing artificial intelligence.

Anurag says that the founders’ vision is still to help Indians in smaller rural areas gain access to the healthcare they need, but they’re starting their work in the cities first. The startup’s team of 12 is also working to improve the app’s security encryption and data science so that users can track their health for free and share the record with their physicians.

At the moment, Visit is helping out more with smaller medical queries, non-urgent questions about acne and sore throats, as well as mental wellness problems like relationship issues and test anxiety. The problems might not seem like much, but right now, they have the potential to save someone a day’s wages or a long, annoying wait in line.

Currency converted from Indian rupees. US$1 = INR 67.03