Ayu Health: Restoring Trust in Healthcare
By Arunima Rajan
Ayu Health uses fixed-price packages to address trust issues in the Indian healthcare system. Assigned counsellors connect patients to the right doctor for teleconsultation and only call them to the hospital when required. Patients and doctors can access digitised health records in a single place through Ayu Health's technology platform, which also facilitates access to insurance providers and additional resources to help patients make informed choices.
Karan Gupta, COO & Co-founder, Ayu Health
Karan Gupta, COO & Co-founder of Ayu Health, is a graduate of IIT Delhi. He has had stints at the Boston Consulting Group and Helion Ventures before co-founding Zefo, an e-commerce venture. He built Ayu Health in 2019 with the intent to provide branded, high-quality healthcare experiences to every Indian resident. Karan was featured in the Forbes India '30 under 30' list in 2018.
Ayu Health began operations in Chandigarh in 2019, onboarding one hospital. Since then, it has grown to more than 100 hospitals with 6000+ beds and reached about 40 million dollars of investment over three rounds of funding.
Ayu Health is transforming healthcare in India by focusing on pricing transparency, use of technology and patient experience. Ayu counsellors have successfully served more than 1 lakh patients with the help of over 250 specialised doctors having an average of more than 15 years of experience.
As Karan explains, "transparency regarding pricing is one of the biggest issues for patients and hospitals. It's more of a problem for patients who don't know what surgery will cost when a doctor tells them about a package of INR50,000, and the bill ultimately ends up being twice that amount. We offer fixed price packages where we commit a price to a patient, which the patient must pay when discharged. This is one of the most important value propositions for us. We make pricing as transparent as possible for the patient.”
Taking the plunge into the healthcare sector
Karan continues: "Because I come from a family of doctors, I have always been interested in healthcare. I saw my father's journey of running a hospital and spent a lot of time trying to understand the pain points from both the hospital's and the patient's perspectives. The time I had spent in the healthcare world excited me to take the plunge into this sector. In the post-pandemic world, my vision is to build a trusted go-to healthcare platform that is affordable and features great healthcare outcomes."
The model
"The Ayu health model is simple. We do not own the hospitals; we partner with existing stand-alone hospitals with 50 to 150 beds. Due to competition amongst the private hospitals, most of the assets invested in capital turn out to be inefficiently allocated, and that is where Ayu solves the problem.
Ayu Health has two design principles that go into building the network: Firstly, there needs to be a hospital less than 15 minutes away from any location where we operate. Secondly, the kind of hospital we work with should be strong in two or three specialities — they often happen to be those of their founding doctors."
The Ayu Health platform uses tools to digitise operations to improve the patient's experience. These includes booking tests online or offering an estimate of the waiting time at the hospital.
Learning from the journey so far
"Having faced many challenges and learning from the journey so far, I can say that running a hospital is a very, very hard business because there are just too many moving parts: there is a focus on clinical quality, doctors, staff, and equipment, and there is the whole business part. How do you get more patients? How do you give them a good experience? How do you ensure that insurance is processed, and the hospital gets payments on time? The most important thing that matters ultimately is how good your clinical outcomes are. How does the patient recover? What is the experience for that patient? If that is taken care of, all things start falling into place. That is one of the most significant things we've learnt and is one of our biggest focus areas going forward. We are ensuring that proper technology adoption happens in this sector. This is hard, and it takes time because many stakeholders are involved. But it's something we are super excited about," says Karan.
The Tech advantage
"Over the next five to ten years, two things will be super important in this sector: the use of technology and customer-centricity. The current market is dominated by healthcare providers in which competition is increasing. Not only do customers have more choices, but they are also more aware and educated. Hence healthcare providers must be more consumer-centric. By that extension, technology will play a crucial role in understanding the patient and diagnosing the disease. Increased use of technology would mean changes such as doctors diagnosing diseases online or patients receiving test reports with the right next set of action items or medicines.
The adoption of technology in the healthcare ecosystem in India has been quite slow. Obviously, AI will come into play as more and more technology comes in, which will mean more use of patient data."
There is an untapped market for Ayu Health due to a lack of pricing transparency in private hospitals, rising medical inflation and increased use of technology after the pandemic.
Talking about his and Ayu Health's journey, he says, " As I was from the tech background, it was hard to break into the healthcare sector. But coming from a family of doctors and being brought up in that ecosystem helped. We knew about doctors, hospitals and the quality of healthcare in Chandigarh, where we started. As you keep working, with time, you can build trust in the minds of patients and doctors with the quality of work you do. For patients, it's simple: the quality of service, care, and outcomes builds trust. For doctors, it's how you partner, how much you can live up to the promises and help them run their hospitals. This starts paying over time and builds trust, making it easier to break further into newer cities or markets. Obviously, due to the pandemic, more and more doctors and patients needed help. This helped build trust and a larger need in the market."
Service to patients and outcomes are of utmost importance for Ayu Health's future, says Karan. Patient outcomes, diagnostics and medicines are also crucial in their future plans.
He explains, "We are already working in five cities. The idea is to continue to grow within the cities and across the country, and over time, with the kind of work we do with the quality of care and outcomes, we can build a trusted brand." His vision is to provide affordable private healthcare to millions in India by partnering with specialised hospitals and a technology platform to make life easier for healthcare providers and patients.