AmarLab

Reasons why easy access to healthcare is important in Bangladesh:

• Being an overpopulated nation, access to diagnostic centers for everyone, especially sick people, senior citizens and pregnant women is very difficult as the traffic in the roads are hectic, time consuming and expensive.
• The reputed diagnostic centers are usually crowded with patients and the waiting times for conducting the tests are often long.
• People with busy schedules find it difficult to manage time to go for their regular health checkups.
• To receive the report, clients or their family members have to visit the diagnostic center again. 
• General people find it difficult to interpret test reports

AmarLab is the solution and we aim to solve the above-mentioned problems. Through mobile app, website and Facebook page, clients’ desired pathology test from their chosen lab is NOW one click/call away.

Our solution will:

• Create awareness
• Save time
• Save money
• Make healthcare convenient

Primarily, people who are physically sick are the users of AmarLab. However, the need of pathological services can be for anyone, at any point of time that the person decides to check his/her health condition. Moreover, creating awareness about regular health checkup is another issue that AmarLab is addressing.

Mobility is a major problem in the big cities of Bangladesh. Initially AmarLab is targeting Dhaka as it is the most densely populated city with a population of 20 million+, where traffic is very hectic (Source: http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/dhaka-population/). Thus, the people of this city need easy mobility to diagnostic center more than any other places. After covering Dhaka, AmarLab will cover other big cities and towns.

Our target market is anyone in need of healthcare support, irrespective of age, group or gender, in Dhaka.

AmarLab is working extensively on creating health awareness through handouts, leaflets and social media posting. Recently, AmarLabs’ founders talked about the importance of regular health checkups as a whole on a national magazine.

One important reason for most people not being too inclined about health checkups is the transportation and traffic. Hence, we are bringing their favorite diagnostic center to their doorstep.

We spoke to 116 people from different age and group, waiting at the hospital queue. Adding travelling time and waiting time in the hospital queue, on average each person has to invest over 2 hours from their regular life. All of them said they want to get rid of the long hospital queue and the hassle to make it there. We visited organizations (such as Zanala BD, Datasoft and Basecamp) and spoke to the employees directly about their access to healthcare. A regular diagnostic checkup is difficult for them as they spend their entire day at the office. They think it is convenient for them if their regular health checkup is be done while they are at their workplace.

The services of AmarLab are designed on the basis of people’s need. We are providing at home pathology service, people can do blood, urine, stool and cough test sitting at their home or workplace. There are many people around us who find it very difficult, to manage time from their busy schedule. Also, there are thousands of people who are bedridden, physically or mentally challenged and pregnant women. They face serious difficulties to visit hospitals to do their diagnosis, AmarLab is for them.

AmarLab is offering a healthcare solution that enables access to diagnostic services from the comfort of home.

Following is the order placement process:

1. Customers and patients place orders for tests through website, app or call center.

2. AmarLabs phlebotomist goes directly to the patient's home or office and collects the test samples (blood/urine/others).

3. AmarLab delivers test samples in certified storage kits to partner hospital/diagnostic center selected by patients.

4. Once reports are ready, AmarLab delivers reports directly to patients address!

As a health-tech startup, AmarLab wants to make its service processes very advances yet simple. Through Amarlabs’ user-friendly website, clients not only can order service, but also can compare prices among different diagnostic centers. We have a client oriented customer service team and call center. In future we will have a mobile app for clients.

• AmarLab is the first service provider of its kind in Bangladesh. Some diagnostic centers offer sample collection occasionally and the process is very inconvenient as they lack extra manpower for this service, they do not serve outside of their area or deliver reports. On the contrary, AmarLab serves almost everywhere in Dhaka and delivers report as well.
• Our sample collection box is a brain child of three months research. The box is very sophisticated and well designed. It is pressure and water proof, temperature controlled, and samples can be preserved for 12 hours. Conventional lab’s sample collection teams lack this feature.
• AmarLabs approach to solve the diagnostic problem is unique as we have identified the people who are in need of this service the most and then targeted them and design our campaigns accordingly. With required funding, we have advanced campaign plans such as customized booths at our partner labs to provide handouts, digital copy of the reports that are easier to preserve, analyzed trend report of the chronic and other patients for free etc.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

• Through Amarlabs website clients can now do price comparison among the partner labs of AmarLab. 
• Technology is an integral part of the innovation of AmarLab. We have already published our website and we want to create a user-friendly App ASAP. Moreover, we want to have a sophisticated tracking system that will show real time location of sample collectors and report delivery person.

AmarLabs activities in response to its outputs, outcomes and overall objective is described in the following Theory of Change Diagram

According to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), in 2011 the population of Dhaka was 12043977 (12M). According to other non-government sources, 20.628 million people lives in Dhaka in 2019. 

Current size of Market (# of people taking diagnostic service in Dhaka/Day) is estimated to be 50,000 per day or 1.5 million per month (Source: Data from various Diagnostic centers in Dhaka).

Current number of people we are serving:

AmarLabs’ operation for last 6 month is part of our prototype (pro-seed) stage. During this period, we have served a total of 230 clients with a steady growth rate (In March we served 5 clients, whereas in August we served 120 clients)

Number we will be serving during Pilot:

We are planning to move to “Seed” stage after getting the required funding. So, for a six months pilot stage, estimated number of clients served is following:

M1          M2          M3          M4          M5          M6

432        454         485         534         585         610

Total= 3100

Number we will be serving (estimated) from year 1 to year 5:

Note: Year 2 onward, AmarLab plans to extend beyond Dhaka and to other big cities in Bangladesh gradually.

Additionally, conduction of free health camp for underprivileged and executive health camps for corporate is part of AmarLabs’ service strategy. In last 6 months we have done 4 executive health camps and 2 free health camps. We aim to increase these numbers exponentially in coming months. 

Within next 12 months, we want to extend our services and reach to the extended parts Dhaka city, including Old Town, Keranigonj and Uttara. 1 year onward, we plan on starting in other major cities of Bangladesh.

By 5 years from now, we aim on covering all the major cities of Bangladesh including Chattogram, Sylhet, Rajshahi, Khulna, Barishal, Comilla, Feni, Rongpur, Narayangonj, Gazipur, Savar, Noakhali, Bogra, Coxs Bazar and Jessore. Inclusion of these cities will enable more than 60 million people the easy access to diagnostic services.

AmarLabs’ healthcare inclusion is not limited to diagnostic services only, creating health awareness is an integral part of the overall vision. We want to achieve this goal by conducting soaring number of free health camps in which there will be free doctor consultation, awareness session in various topics such as explanation of basic test results and primary remedies, basic education of different organs of the body and its related diseases and remedies, feminine hygiene and others.

During the recent crisis of Dengue, Amarlab offered over phone free doctor consultation for anyone in need (client or not). The overwhelming response from people has motivated us already and we want to do it in larger scale in future. 

AmarLabs’ ultimate goal is to bring healthcare at the doorstep of Peoples Republic of Bangladesh. The more people we will be serving, the less they will have to face the hassle to undergo diagnostic tests and other health related issues. 

1. We are first health-tech service provider of our kind, thus introducing and habituating people to a new concept is a challenge.
2. Being the pioneer has given us competitive advantage, but that too with the cost that there are no one before us that we can learn and do better from.
3. One crucial barrier is the health seeking behavior of urban people due to their busy life.
4. We are taking a creative approach to solve diagnostic related issues, nonetheless, implementing creative approach itself is a challenge. For instance, we are trying to apply online real time tracking of the test status (whether the blood sample is on the/ undergoing test/ test done etc) and we are facing a lot of barriers because many of our key stakeholders such as diagnostic center and clients have not been introduced to this process before.
5. People of Bangladesh are not tech savvy yet, thus implementing new service that includes use of website, app and mobile doctor consultation will be a challenge. For instance, not many are ordering from website, rather they are calling the call center. If we can provide them training sessions about using website and app, gradually people will get habituated to it.

1. The biggest challenge is to make people habituated and comfortable about this new service type. Interestingly, our previous client record shows that after using this service once, people become very comfortable about it. Therefore, recurring users’ percentage in AmarLab is very high. So, we need to make as many trials as possible. The more people use our services, the more recurring clients we will have. In order to achieve this, we need innovative and extensive marketing campaigns.
2. As we are first of our kind, we are our own teachers. We are learning on our way and trying to improvise on our learning.
3. AmarLab will bring diagnostic services at home and office. Thus, people with busy life will find access to healthcare easily.
4. To solve the 4th and 5th problem mentioned in previous chapter, we need to arrange training and workshops on the know-how of tracking and other relevant technologies to partners and clients. 

Team AmarLab consists of 11 members in total, among them:

Full time staff- 09

Part time staff- 02

Team AmarLab is very versatile as it is a combination of expertise in relevant fields required to run a health-tech startup project. Our team includes Human Centered Design (HCD) specialist, doctor, marketing and operations experts with previous startup experience.

Our team consists of people with more than a decade of experience in public health services including hospitals, diagnostic centers, and public health facilities. Our tech team lead by HCD specialist is very keen on integrating the suitable technologies to our service. The doctor is over a decade experience, therefore we can ensure quality and accurate health service. Our growth manager is an entrepreneur with multiple startup experience, also our head of marketing is highly experienced and has worked in various national and international projects. The phlebotomists (sample collectors) are highly efficient with more than 5 years of work experience in this field. Our customer experience team is highly oriented towards top notch client service, starting from receiving calls  deliver reports.

Currently we are partnered with two top-most diagnostic centers of the country, namely, 

1. Popular Diagnostic Center (https://populardiagnostic.com/) 

2. Ibn Sina Trust (https://www.ibnsinatrust.com/). 

We are working on on-boarding more partner diagnostic centers to our partnership list.

Our diagnostic partners perform the lab tests for the samples we collect. It is a win-win situation for both the lab and us, we provide them with the clients can not visit the labs and they give us a share of the revenue.

AmarLab has partnered with Robi (a leading telco in Bangladesh). We are using Robi's Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service in our call center to provide our clients with proper call center experience. 

Corporate is a sector that we want to penetrate in. Many of the leading corporate of Bangladesh have partnered with diagnostic centers to do their staffs yearly corporate checkup. We have this deal with one organization at the moment, BaseCamp Bangladesh (https://thebasecampbd.com/). However, we want to include as many corporate partners as we can, because only we have the setup to provide diagnostic services from workplaces which ultimately will save a lot of time of corporate workforce.  

Initially, we are operating by the funding we secured from Spreeha Bangladesh Foundation and Zanala Bangladesh Limited. We are generating very small service revenue regularly, but as a startup we are mostly utilizing the money we have received from funding. However, we have to share certain amount of equity to get funding. Hence, we are aiming for different startup competitions, crowd funding and angel investors to run the business until AmarLab is self-sustaining.

Below diagrams are the illustration of Market Linkage Model in relation to AmarLabs' path to financial sustainability 

Winning the Tiger Challenge will certainly provide a platform to take off for AmarLab to reach its destination which is to provide easily accessible healthcare to the people of Urban areas of Bangladesh.

For any service oriented startup, the most challenging factor is to create brand name for the company to gain clients trust. Participating in Tiger Challenge, in support of MIT Solve,will increase the brand value of AmarLab. 

As already mentioned,the winning amount will help us to accelerate our expansion.

Finally, winning this competition will provide us with the opportunity to take part in the international portion of the challenge which will create more opportunity for us as well as more learning for the team.

Different renowned diagnostic centers in the urban areas are our first priority in partnership list. This will ensure the quality of the lab tests. 

Furthermore, we need more corporate partners as it will help us generate higher revenue as well as building network.