Date: 21-09-2024 at 18:09
Thinking about a problem deeply lets you experience different emotions for a while. It is similar to being in a relationship however in this case your partner is invisible. I have been going through different emotions while working on Jilo Health. These emotions are just the decisions related to trade-offs - short-term gains vs long-term gains for all the stakeholders.
Our past 2 years of work taught us the most important nuanced of the healthcare space - healthcare is not a transaction-driven category. When the core of the category is so different it always struggles with confirmation bias by community members.
Dr Steven Cole (Professor of medicine and psychiatry and biobehavioural sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine) a prolific researcher whose work has cast light on the disease process said - “we know disease is a long-term process. And if something is fundamentally long-term, how can this be a transactional-based business model?
The core healthcare is responsible for keeping people away from hospitals and healthcare providers. Therefore, the non-transactional nature is against the other stakeholders’ incentives. This has been the root cause behind the trust deficit among the stakeholders.
Having said that, a non-transactional nature doesn’t mean - there is no space to make money. What we have learnt is that the net value creation is exponential when we think in terms of experience and continuous treatment.
We are currently working with a Medical College and Hospital as partners, and I was stunned by the fact that these hospitals don’t even care about the diagnosis data point - they only care about name and phone number so they can contact those leads in the future.
On the other hand, for us, the primary health vitals of the users are the key data points because with that we will figure out a potential future health risk and how can we minimize that risk so the user doesn’t have to visit the hospital.
And once you are successful in keeping a user away from the hospital, the entire healthcare delivery cost is reduced to just a few thousand - that is the cost of insurance. Congratulations - now the healthcare is affordable for everyone in the country.
But this is not going to be as easy as I typed on a Google Doc using my laptop keypad. This is a decade-long journey with a mindset to solve this problem and build on the intersection of technology and core healthcare (the clinical aspect of healthcare).
The best thing about building value-driven healthcare for India’s missing middle - 130 million households is that you have trillion-dollar technology available freely in terms of ABDM. We have also observed that this would be an asset-light model with the potential to build a large business out of India.
There is no need to build physical infrastructure because available infrastructures are super underutilised, especially newly built ones from the TG. This is certain, most of these asset-heavy stakeholders will never be focused on optimisation through the utilisation of technology. Because they have already a lot on their plate, therefore, only an external stakeholder (Startups like Jilo Health) can bring much-needed efficiency to solve this problem.
Coming back to the trade-off decisions, our decisions are based on the problem we are solving, and we are certainly prioritizing long-term gains that will help us make quality healthcare affordable for India’s missing middle - 130 million households (500 million Indians).
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