A new healthcare startup in India wants to revolutionize access to healthcare. The company, which is currently in its early stages, plans to offer a range of services, including telemedicine, online consultations, and home visits. By offering these services at affordable prices, they want to make quality healthcare accessible to everyone in India.
How do I start a healthcare startup?
Starting a healthcare startup takes a lot of work. Here are the approaches you can take.
- Study the market:
In a field as complex and demanding as healthcare, thorough research is essential. Concentrate on researching the market, its target audience, and available technologies.
Target audience- This includes healthcare providers (hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, medical practitioners), health insurance companies, technology companies, and patients.
Desires and concerns – Identify your target audience’s basic needs and problems. To do this, the team will have to go through medical research papers and even interview doctors, insurance companies, and patients.
Healthcare market – Learn about the limitations that may prevent patients or institutions from adopting your solution. This ranges from slow internet and paper-based processes to low digital literacy in rural areas.
Competition – Examine businesses that have made similar attempts to solve problems, especially those that were unsuccessful. It may sound like a lot of work, but persistence pays off. Ultimately, it helps create viable medical startup ideas and fire startups that don’t have an audience.
- Hire a medical advisory board
A good concept alone is not enough to make a startup successful. You also need to understand the ins and outs of medicine and the niche. Therefore, expert opinion is useful. The Medical Board provides a weighted perspective on initiatives, obstacles to consider, and ideas on how to bulletproof business models.
Board members are also kept up-to-date on technological advancements and upcoming regulatory changes that may benefit startups. The credibility of professionals in this field increases in the eyes of financiers, healthcare providers, and other strategic partners.
Helps maintain diversity on the Medical Advisory Board. Balancing medical experts and generalists. You can also hire scientists, healthcare software specialists, nurses, and other non-physicians.
- Development overview
The development team should create an overview of the product. The documentation should describe goals, expected results, functional and non-functional requirements, and other dependencies. The following aspects should be covered:
- Software (programming languages, frameworks, open source tools, application programming interfaces).
- Design (user interface, application logic, core functionality)
- Architecture (architecture type, tenant isolation strategy, dependency levels, and components)
- Security (internal and external risks, security mechanisms)
- Transparent documents help team members keep their work in sync
- Helps managers understand the costs of development.
- Make a business plan and a budget:
A project should have a long-term plan that includes goals, milestones, time estimates, and, of course, a budget. Calculate the intrinsic costs of your business.
Start with temporary expenses such as stocks, property, real estate, and security deposits.
Next, determine your recurring expenses, including fixed costs (office rent, insurance, internet, phone services, and bank charges) and variable costs (materials, cloud hosting, income tax, and outsourcing services). List development costs based on required technical standards. Always remember that adding features and mobile versions can increase costs.
- Start with an MVP
Test ideas, core functionality, and revenue models in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) (a simplified, barebones version of your product) before committing to full-scale development. Focus on what matters ie. ability to solve key audience problems. All others can wait for a later release.
- Choosing a revenue model
Upfront license fees or subscription-based models are two options available to companies launching health tech startups. Wearables, direct-to-patient services, and remote patient monitoring tools can all be paid for at a flat rate.
Stick to recurring payments because cloud-based software providers can usually convert more people with a lower upfront cost. These pricing models are used by most subscription-based services: Freemium, Flat rate pricing, Pay as you go pricing, and Per-user pricing.
- Ensure regulatory compliance
Start by evaluating your IT setup, organizational structure, and policies. Then identify the personal health data you are processing, assess the risk to your system, and calculate the potential impact of a data breach.
Use technical safeguards to reduce external threats. It’s also important to implement role-based access, with different levels of permissions based on employee roles. Ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other regulations can be a daunting task, but compliance management tools can make the job easier. They help ensure that your software and activities comply with security standards. A reputable vendor can even fix cybersecurity weaknesses and train employees on security and compliance practices.
- Promote your product before release
Start presenting your solution to your key audience well in advance of its release.
Government and insurance companies should be enthusiastic about your product. Innovative medical technology is more difficult to promote. Be prepared to cite scientific research to endorse your product. Additionally, findings should be willingly submitted for peer review and randomized controlled trials to increase the reliability of the findings.
- Create and publish a complete product
Before embarking on a large project, ask the developers to change their technical requirements based on the feedback you received after the MVP was released. Use a cloud-based infrastructure that allows you to customize storage and computing resources to suit your needs.
Use a modular monolith or microservices architecture to organize software modules into loosely coupled, independent modules. This ensures that the functionality of the system is independent of other components and allows easy updates of modules without disrupting the entire system. It helps you improve your software with out-of-the-box APIs.
What do healthcare startups do?
Health tourism is a booming industry in India. Most countries don’t have the best medical facilities, so companies provide medical care to patients abroad. These companies are called healthcare startups. They work in various fields such as medical tourism, research, and wellness. So these are important areas to understand.
Healthcare startups are tackling problems that big companies can’t handle. Governments cannot afford to provide healthcare to the entire population.
Because of this, companies are providing medical services that are less expensive and require fewer staff. For example, the International Human Genome Project in India studies cancer and blood diseases. The project was funded by tech giants such as Google and Microsoft to analyze samples from around the world. This enables new clinical treatments without wasting time or money.
They also focus on areas where more innovation is needed, rather than big companies that focus on profit margins. Medical services are often provided free of charge to low-income patients who otherwise cannot afford to pay. This includes affordable vaccinations and food safety education for poor families. Smaller hospitals can easily purchase this cost-effective model without compromising their finances. To succeed in this space, healthcare startups need to secure funding and talent, unlike regular businesses.
Most investors prefer to fund medical projects because they are useful both nationally and internationally. Additionally, many companies are using medical tourism events as an advertising platform for new treatments and clinics abroad. These hold meetings between foreign clients and local Indian doctors and therapists for individual treatment plans. Only licensed and funded hospitals can enter into such proper business agreements.
Healthcare is a growing industry thanks to medical tourism events, research projects, and small, entrepreneur-run clinics. However, the need for funding, government needs, and the idea of low-cost innovation for the general public makes it very difficult to start a business in this sector. Still, people who value people do a good job!
FAQ: Healthcare Startup in India
- How many healthcare startups are there in India?
India has around 3500 healthcare startups.
- Which city is the healthcare capital of India?
Chennai is the healthcare capital of India. Chennai is very progressive when it comes to modern medical facilities.
Wrapping Up
Technology platforms and data-driven approaches will improve access to quality healthcare startup in India for millions of people across the country while enabling patients and providers to achieve more efficient care and lower costs. The company has already secured investment from several venture capital firms, which bodes well for future growth in India.