Amit AgrawalFounder of ineeddoctor Published On: Monday, February 15, 2016 Views 3908

Ineeddoctor.in is a platform to provide optimum health care services while focusing patient delight in niche areas. Having said so, what started with just a website with a listing of Doctors, we have added multiple features with the introduction of our call center, just a simple number 9111-31-9111. In smaller cities, access to internet & smart phones is limited; moreover, a personal touch is very helpful while talking to patients. This way, ineeddoctor offers a customer delight to the patients. Through Ineeddoctor, a patient can schedule his consultation with preferred doctors, plan for investigations, treatments, surgeries & medicines and get discounts on everything. With our corporate association program, that we recently launched we have enrolled the students of 50+ schools and their family members and provided them an Ineeddoctor CAP Card, that helps them in availing the optimum medical services from our partner health care providers.

After having worked with a leading IT company and staying for years in North America, I decided to fly back to India to try my hands on entrepreneurship. Coming from a business class family and having part of the family business since an age of 12 years, I soon got a grip of it and started my first venture, which is an IT services company (Entit Consultancy Services). Very soon we also reached a revenue milestone of 1 MUSD in our venture. During my 4 years of stay, I found many challenges while availing good health care for my family.

Since I belong to a big joint family, visiting a doctor is a routine activity with some or the other family member. Every time, getting a doctor’s appointment and then waiting in the clinic for long hours would make me sick for sure, leave alone the sick member waiting with me. My co-founders Abhishek & Akansh shared similar experiences. This initiated the idea of ineeddoctor that has two prime goals i.e. help patients to reduce their waiting time in the clinic and provide them a way to reduce their medical costs. I wanted to bridge the gap between the services required by a patient and the services offered by medical practitioners in the Indian context with the help of technology. An easy availability of health care services with least harassment is what a patient needs.

There is so much to learn in this life. Just when you think that you have had enough, life will throw something more challenging at you. You just need to be geared up to face that and overcome. Keep that learning to help you in your next challenge.

Since I started up from a tier 2 city in Central India, it was most frustrating to explain the needs of IT spending even among the best of customers. Lack of IT infrastructure in the Hospitals / Clinics and lower adaptability of use of technology among medical professionals held us up initially. During initial days, we even used to ponder whether we had made the right decision to startup here rather than a metro city. However, looking at our situation today, I am happy we did.

We realized that we can’t enforce our solution to the users, we would have to change our-self. That’s what we did. We changed our business & working model. We used the tech our-self, but let the users be free. This helped a lot.

So far, we are self-financed.

We are perhaps not a very good paymaster. However, we have a very friendly environment for each team member. We don’t believe in micro-managing and give the freedom to our team to take their decisions. This helps in maintaining the motivation of the employees.

Aggression, Perseverance and Positive Attitude towards what you believe in are perhaps the key to achieving success.

Apart from the social media FB, Whatsapp, Linkedin, I use google services like Analytics, Drive etc. Office tools, if explored properly can do wonders for any startup.

Spending time with my kids in discussing various issues (theirs and sometimes mine). Kids are not just best negotiators, but they bring fresh and unbiased perspectives.

What have I to change? Ah! Kidding. Out of many things, I wish I could be more organized towards my fitness & dietary regime. That would certainly help my efficiency too.

• One tip to success:

Hope for the best but be prepared for the worst too. There is nothing wrong in failing sometimes, just chin up and move ahead.

• One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Underestimating the power of teamwork.

• One most important lesson that you have learned until now:

That there are more lessons to come.

At Ineeddoctor, we plan to focus on depth rather than breadth. Since we launched it in July 2015, we have already catered to around 10000 patients so far and have registered over 1000 doctors. From helping in OPD services, we are now offering In-Patient services too. We plan to include over 200 schools & 100 other Corporates from across the state under our CAP program by the end of 2016. We plan to take this up to 50+ cities in the coming three years. We are planning to add several services to our platform that can make Ineeddoctor what it means. Having said so, we are planning to add services for all those people who need doctors (and, believe me, they are not just patients). More details will be shared very soon.

I would start up early, maybe just after college or even school.

Our Ancestral place in Rajasthan (for being with the roots), Las Vegas (for fun) & Hyderabad (what not, from Biryani to Hi-Tech).

“Time & Tides are always on the side of the best navigator.”