Facilitating Quality & affordable healthcare in rural India

Lack of accessibility to quality and affordable healthcare for rural communities causes poor quality of health, loss of lives, and livelihood is the problem that we are trying to address.

India's 70% population is concentrated in rural areas but only 3% of the doctors reside there.

Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are one of the poorest states having more than 250 million people, surviving on less than $5 a day. The targeted population is one of the most underserved segments in the healthcare aspect. Hailing from such areas, me and my co-founder Shubham have grown up seeing how it goes and how our communities have to bear the cost, time, and efforts in searching and getting doctor appointments, consulting with the right specialists, and accessing tertiary care in big cities.

In the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the population is primarily active as daily wage earners and in agriculture work. Whenever anyone falls sick in the family, the whole family comes into stress not just because he/she falls sick but because of the complications associated with getting the right treatment from the right doctor.
To get an appointment, the breadwinner of the family has to first visit the doctor’s clinic at 4-5 AM and wait in a queue for 3-4 hours with no surety of getting it. Keeping the odd timings, cost, and efforts aside, he also has to lose his multiple day’s wages as getting appointments, meeting the doctor, and getting tests done takes the whole day and usually spills over to a second day.
For a majority, this is not possible, so they end up going to the quacks(local unqualified medical practitioners) who make long-term health complications by doing wrong treatment and prescribing irregular doses of medicine. Furthermore, emergency health requirements end sorrowfully since immediate meeting or speaking with a competent doctor is impossible.
When they need access to tertiary care or critical care treatment in big cities, they are highly exploited by middlemen and middlemen take them to the wrong hospitals that give them a high commission, and this costs patients health and pocket.

At BigOHealth, we are redefining healthcare access for the rural & suburban populations. We do it by creating channels fine-tuned to our target customers, which enables the patient to go through the entire healthcare process step by step: from primary tele-consultation in villages, to searching and booking hassle-free online appointments with the nearby doctor in tier03/4 towns, to tele/video consultation with top specialist doctors, getting diagnostics tests done, getting doorstep delivery of medicines, and accessing end-to-end tertiary care in big cities.

Our typical customer base includes both smartphone and non-smartphone users and does not always understand which doctor to meet for a particular issue. Keeping these users in mind, we have developed a vernacular mobile app and web app and for non-smartphone users, we have a 24x7 helpline. The third channel is physical touchpoints i.e our e-clinic set up in partnerships with village pharmacies.

This concept is based on the first-hand experience of the fact that the user group of smartphones in Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have grown exponentially; as an average smartphone is available for less than $80, and the smartphones users in India is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.9%, according to an ASSOCHAM-PwC joint study. There are 290 million active internet users in rural India. Recent affordability and volume-based revenue models adopted by telecom companies have increased the average user group by 4-folds. It can be fairly said that every family now has at least one smartphone user. Due to these innovative penetrations of internet services, Bihar registered the highest growth in internet users across both urban and rural areas, registering a growth of 35 percent over last year. BigOHealth is riding on this momentum to scale the online platform adaptability amongst people to facilitate the booking of healthcare services through our online-mobile-based app. 

BigOHealth has a team of qualified professionals who audits the healthcare professionals from different specialization before enlisting them on the platform. This exercise ensures enlisting only qualified professionals on the platform and advertently reduces the money and time of patients; delivering the most suitable treatment.

The Modus Operandi of our platform is as follows:
For tele-consultation
Person gets sick- search the available doctor at that time in App based on symptoms- choose consultation time- pay consultation fee online-  tele-consultation request is placed- app informs the doctor- doctor calls(audio/video) the patients at the chosen time- prescribe medication- patients book home-based diagnostic test- the report is sent to doctor as well as patients- doctor prescribe medicine- patient order medicine online in the app- medicine get delivered at the doorstep.

For clinical Visit
Person gets sick- locates suitable doctor based on symptoms- schedules visit time- app informs the doctor- appointment is placed- patient visits the doctor- finds suitable physical test centers nearby-submits samples-receives report on their app-email sent to the doctor also-if need arises, patient visits the doctor again otherwise-treatment is prescribed online- patient searches for govt schemes on the app to facilitate govt/non-govt help in treatment-patient looks for medicine shops online and places the purchase.

The online platform mitigates any need for carrying physical reports, the ability to choose doctors in times of need from the created pool on the app, the timely monitored treatment ensures zero exploitation and zero chances of procuring dubious or unnecessary medicine. 

Our target beneficiary are rural and semi-urban population of
Age: 18-50 Years
Gender: Male and Female
Job: Students, Daily wage earners, SMB owners, Private and Govt. Employees
Income Range: Inr 8000 -Inr 100,000
Geography: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh

Currently, they don't have any medium to consult with the doctors except conventional methods of visiting the clinic, waiting in the queue, and meeting the doctor which causes loss of time and daily wages and delays in treatment.
Our solution helps them to connect and consult with a competent doctor 24x7 and help them to book hassle-free online appointment with the right doctors in nearby cities and offer end-to-end diagnostics test, tertiary care treatment in big cities and doorstep delivery of medicine.
Thus, BigOHealth innovation increases the accessibility of healthcare services, reduces the time taken from appointment to treatment and saves time and money, and improves the quality of health and life of rural population.

Hailing from rural areas, I and my co-founder have grown up seeing the difficulty of cost, time, and efforts our communities have to bear in getting doctor appointments in nearby tier-¾, consulting a specialist doctor, and accessing tertiary care treatment in tier-½  cities.

We do our primary research with our target customers time to time and based on their inputs and feedback we improve our products. 

We have also two doctors as our mentors who helps us to understand the problem more deeply and from doctor point of view.

The major purpose to apply to Solve is to:
1. Access mentors and get mentorship from expert in our field to scale our solution to more geography and make a sustainable business.
2. Acess to funding and grants
3. Join and interact like-minded folks who are on a mission to transform world through their innovation

1. We focus on building local doctor-patient ecosystems, and facilitate progressive access to extended networks when needed.
2. Our tele-consultation is convertible into physical appointments without any additional consultation fee.
3. We offer hassle-free online appointments to the senior donors of the city as well.
4. We offer all our services through phone calls also and 24x7 call support.
5. We offer complete healthcare facilitation from primary care in villages to all the way tertiary care in metros.
6. We do tie-ups with local community touchpoints like village pharmacy, CSC and make them our access points.

In the next year, we aim to Impact 500K Patients and in the next year we aim to impact 5 million patients from rural underserved communities.
To achieve this and cover and reach out to the whole spectrum of patients in a cost-effective and efficient way, we
1. Run awareness campaigns on social media platforms.
2. Put billboards in densely populated areas and posters at doctor’s clinics.
3. Ask doctor’s staff to put BigOHealth’s stamp on the prescription.
4. Run widespread health awareness camps to create awareness about health and our services.
5. Collaborate with local community touchpoints like Common Services Centers and e-Seva Kendra and make them BigOHealth access points.
6. Partner with village pharmacies and set up our digital clinics there. In the next 1 years, we aim to set up 800 digital clinics.
7. Partnership with NGO and ASHA workers.

We measure our progress through:
1. Number of appointments facilitated in a month
2. Number of consultations facilitated in a month
3. Number of diagnostic tests facilitated in a month
4. Active numbers of users of App in a month

The theory of changes:
Short term outcome will be saving of daily wages and time and easily access to healthcare services
Long term outcome will be improved quality of health, life and livelihood

We use Native Android for mobile app, React.js, Next.js for web app, Node.js for backend, and AWS Cloud Services for hosting and deployment of our mobile App and Web App. Our teleconsultation system is HIPPA compliant and works on a peer-to-peer network. We use OTP-based user verification and authentication for every login. We use software like Bitbucket, Jira, ZAP, SQLMap, firebase, etc.

When a user makes a request for teleconsultation on the App, we store the patient's basic information on our cloud and the request is sent to the requested doctor and the doctor accepts the user request and calls(audio/video) the patient through the App itself. A video/audio call between patient and doctor is based on WebRTC protocol and can't be intercepted by others. Patients can also share their previous medical history or test reports in the chatbox with doctors. In the App, a patient could store their medical records, which are stored in an encrypted bucket on AWS. For security purposes, the URL for each file is signed and can only be accessed by patients after the authorization token. 

For non-smartphone users, we have a single helpline number where a patient calls, and our executives note down the basic details and immediately connect him with the required doctor.

We both the co-founders are from rural areas and we hire team memebers from all the comunities and religion without any socio-economic barrier.
Any person having right set of skills, we welcome them in our team