According to the 2010 World Health Statistics report, there were only 6.13 lakh physicians in the country, against a requirement of 13.3 lakh, which amounts to a more than 50 per cent shortage of doctors in the country. Even with these depressing figures, there are increasing reports of India’s best medical brains choosing to move abroad for a better life and pay. With such a wide demand and supply gap, how many Indians can practically hope to consult a qualified doctor at a price that won’t burn a hole in their pockets? “Issues in health care are similar in India and the US as doctors are highly trained, but extremely expensive resources makes it difficult to have an equitable distribution of doctors in every city, in every country,” says Dr Debraj Shome, the co-founder of the Mumbai based firm Angels Health that aims to bridge this very divide with its online platform MediAngels, also hailed as the world’s first “e-hospital”. “And I realise that good quality health care is not just a problem for the masses. Even for educated doctors such as myself, reaching the right doctor at the right time can be a problem, as I have witnessed from close quarters.”

Started by renowned facial plastic surgeon Dr Debraj Shome and Dr Arbinder Singal in January 2011, one can do “everything on MediAngels that can be done at a physical hospital except surgeries, of course”. That means, uploading a patient’s medical history online to consulting a doctor through videoconferencing to getting medicines delivered at home, can all be done sitting at home. It’s a boon for elderly people and patients who can’t move from their beds.At present, patients can consult from among 350 doctors on board in 93 specialities from 15 countries including India. These doctors are screened through a highly stringent process by a five-member committee of doctors from around the world, one of whom is the head of department of Dermatological Surgery at Stanford University, USA.

While consultation with an Indian specialist could cost between Rs250 to Rs750 to a patient, consultation with a foreign specialist costs upto $150. “A normal consultation with a good qualified specialist in the US can cost you $250, with our platform, we’ve brought it down by more than half, and the advice right at your doorstep,” Shome says. Apart from its doctors, the platform also verifies all of its 21,000 sample collection centres across the country by the American College of Pathologists, so that only qualified professionals collect and evaluate the patients’ blood or urine samples to upload the results on the patient’s online profile on the MediAngels platform. This is also a great way to maintain a repository of all such tests of the patients conducted in the past. Shome reports treating 10,000 patients in the first year of starting the business itself but is reluctant to disclose figures for last year as it prepares to raise its first angel funding next month.

Funded by HDFC PE, the e-hospital has a 90 per cent user base comprising of Indians and a 10 per cent foreign user base, owing to the global nature of the platform. Out of this 90 per cent, about half the consultants were sought by people from metros and Tier 1 cities while the other half by Tier 3 and 4 cities. “We have even got patients from villages coming to the platform, raising queries in Hindi, which shows the crying need for health care across every corner of the country,” Dr Shome says. With a team of 18 people and a target to reach the $2 million mark by next year, the CEO confesses that running a business is “more challenging” than practicing as a surgeon. “You have far more control over what you’re doing as a doctor because you are only dependent on your skills, but you need a lot of crossfunctional expertise and collaboration with other people to get the work done in business,” he says. “But one less challenge of running an online hospital is that we can get the best medical minds from around the world to treat patients, without worrying about geographies.”