Dr. Now

My mission as a social entrepreneur is to provide quality healthcare at an affordable price to underserved populations.

In Brazil, a country with roughly 200 million inhabitant and 500 thousand doctors, there are still screaming inequalities in access to health care.

Just some examples: There are 4 times more doctors in cities than in rural areas and Sao Paulo alone concentrates 50% of all doctors in Brazil! Also, only 20% of the population can afford a health plan!

This inequality in access to healthcare leads to a plethora of unnecessary suffering…. 

Digital health can help bridging this geographic and economic gap!

Telemedicine was illegal in Brazil until April 2020, when a new law triggered by the Covid pandemic was promulgated. Now, telemedicine is one of the fastest growing markets in the country!

Dr. Now provides immediate access to a consultation with a doctor through telemedicine. Patients are able to see a doctor at any time, wherever they are, at an affordable price and without a health plan. All they need is a smartphone with access to internet, which almost 80% of the Brazilian population has. 

Our target customers are the roughly 140 million Brazilians comprised of the population below the 20% of Brazilians rich enough to afford a health plan and above the poorest proportion of population totally depending on the free public health system.

For people in rural areas, but also for people in the huge Brazilian megalopoles,  Dr. Now will allow patients to have an affordable consultation with a doctor with no waiting time. This will save people a lot of time and money, will make the health-care system more efficient and avoid a lot of unnecessary traffic. 

Dr. Now has been created by three co-founders with a complimentary set of skills and expertise. 

Fortunat Diener, a social entrepeneur from Switzerland with 15 years of experiences in international development cooperation, brings the necessary impact focus to the company. 

Alysson Ajackson, our CTO from Brazil, has a sound experience in building robust platforms. 

Dr. Fabricio Pelluci, our Chief Health Officer from Brazil brings the necessary medica knowlegde. He is professor of Iinnovation at Unimed College and hold a MBA in Health Management by FGV.

In addition to the co-founders, we have 7 Brazilian team members and growing, which allows us to be fully operate our MVP. 

Four international experts are serving Dr. Now as advisors in the area of digital health, health care management, finance and IT. 

I am mainly looking for support in team building and fundraising. 

Our competitive main edge is the instant medical consultation based on a business and system similar to Uber. But the systematic use of pre-consultation triage, affordable prices for less advantaged populations and the toolbox offered for free to health professionals are also strong differentiators with our competitors. 

By providing both patients and health professional with added value and an attractive digital solution, we hope to be able to create a catalytic effect and a dynamic marketplace. 

Our philosophy is to build over time a full digital health ecosystem that will put the patient at the centre and allow all stakeholders to have a positive impact on the health system. 

We hope to reach 100k patients and 200 health profesisonals in the first year and at least 500k patiens and 1000 health professionals within five years. 

Using a B2B go-to-market strategy for the onbaording of patients and healthp professionals, we hope to be able to reach these goals. 

We are already negotiating a strategic partnership with a "cartão de benefício" (health membership clubs with monthly fees giving access to discount consultations; there are over 20 million users of these clubs in Brazil) who has 297k clients in his database. 

Initially, there will be three main metrics for our impact: 

1) number of patients having acess to consultations in remote regions

2) savings made by patients using teleconsultations instead of in-person doctor visits

3) volume of CO2 emmissions avoided through teleconsultations. 

However, we are still working on how to operationalize and measure these metrics automatically with data obtained throuhg our platform. 

Our theory of change is based on the two main gaps we have identified in terms of lack of access to health-care in Brazil: an geographic gap and an economic gap. We believe that telemedicine  and our business model  can significantly contribute to reduce these two gaps. 

Here some numbers that exemplify what I described above: 

There are four times more doctors in cities than in rural municipalities in Brazil and there are 2,5 times more doctors in the richer southern part of the country, compared to the poorer northern part. Actually, Sao Paulo alone concentrates 50% of all doctors in Brazil. Telemedicine can help bridging this gap since it will allow people in areas with a low density of doctors having access to a first consultation. 

About 87% of the Brazilian population is not satisfied with the public health system (SUS), but only about 20% of the people can afford a health plan. By offering a prompt teleconsultation service for RS 60,00 (approx. 10 CHF), we will allow less advantages populations to have access to immediate health care. In comparison, a consultation with a general physician in Brazil costs generally between RS 100,00 and RS 120,00. 

Technology has the curious ability to interact and improve processes that already work. It's our case. Dr Now seeks to provide both healthcare professionals and patients who need to reach people beyond physical barriers an environment where this is possible.

We integrate communication resources (Whatsapp and E-mail) and financial solutions custom-built by our team to both manage the effort to match professionals and clients and to ease the tax obligations inherent to the provision of medical and nursing services.

Finally, the core of our product: the possibility to both attend and be assisted remotely via fully integrated video call from triage to medical care with quality and stability.

We have no prejudice towards gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. when hiring people. But since we are still in a early stage of your start-up, we are unable yet to have a proactive policy in this regard....

Our business model as marketplace is to connect patients and health professionals through a digital platform serving the needs of both parties, with a focus on instant medical consultation service.

Our revenue model is very simple, we take a flat fee of RS 15,00 (approx. 2,50 CHF) for each transaction.

Our prices are very attractive since we charge only RS 60,00 (approx. 10,00 CHF) for each consultation, of which RS 40,00 (approx. 7,00 CHF) goes automatically to the doctor and RS 5,00 (approx. 1,00 CHF) to the nurse.

For patients not only the price in itself is attractive - an average consultation with a general practitioner in Brazil costs roughly RS 100,00 (approx. 17,00 CHF) - but they also save a lot of time and money normally spend on driving to a doctor and waiting in overcrowded clinics.

For doctors and nurses this is very attractive because we bring them not only patients, but also a totally flexible way to attend to them and a free toolbox for digital consultations. And we are focusing mainly on young health professionals of which there are over 25 thousand entering the market every year. 

So far, the company has been running on personal funds of the founder. Currently, we will implement a small "crowd-funding" campain, mainly with FFF, in order to collect between 50k and 100k CHF so that we can survive in a boostrap mode over the next 6 months or so. Then, once we have sufficient traction to show, we will look a a more professional seed funding round of approx. 500k - 1000k CHF to boost our growth. 

So far, I have invested 50k CHF in the company from personal funds. Over the next couple of months, we hope that with our own revenues generated and a small pre-seed fund of approx. 50k-100k CHF we will be able to generate enough traction to attract a proper seed funding. The launch of our platform is planned around the end of March and we have already onboarded 50 doctors and 10 nurses that will attend on our platform. Through digital marketing and our B2B campaing with "cartoes de beneficio" we hope to be able to attract a significant amount of patients to our platform.