Speaking about the idea, Ashish Bhatia, Co-Founder & CEO, LabsAdvisor, said, “There is also a menace of some doctors getting commissions from the labs, which increase the cost of testing for the patients. The quality of testing is also suspect in some cases. Labsadvisor.com aims to tackle all these issues.”
Bhatia came face to face with the issues in the Indian healthcare system when his parents went through difficult illness phase. The desire to be a part of the solution led him to initiate this venture.
Bhatia is an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus while Shukla is an IIT-Delhi graduate. Both of them had varied years of experience working in different industries across Europe, US and India. It has started its journey in February 2015 and later in July/August the venture raised over Rs. 1 crore in its angel funding round through a group of angels and will try to raise another round later this year.
Scope & challenges
According to Bhatia, The Indian diagnostic market is currently pegged at Rs. 40,000 crores. It is projected to grow to Rs. 120,000 crore by 2022. The growth is being driven by the changing demographics, increase in disease burden and increasing awareness about health issues.
“The major challenge is the availability of the right talent. While India has millions entering the job market every month, the quality of the talent is fairly low. If someone has done an MBA, you cannot take for granted that they will know the areas that are covered in a typical MBA course”, expressed Bhatia.
As the industry is highly unorganised, start-ups have a huge opportunity to not only to aggregate the labs online but also take a part in improving the quality of testing and participate in logistics of collecting samples.
Business model
The labs usually offer us a huge discount on their MRP. The venture keeps a part of the discount that the labs give us on their MRP, as the referral fee.
The discount varies from 15 per cent to 50 per cent of the MRP. We extend most of this discount to the customer after keeping a small referral fee for ourselves.
The performance so far
LabsAdvisor has been focussing on Delhi / NCR as its primary market, as it receives maximum transaction from capital city. It is getting 50 bookings a day and showing a growth over 100 per cent month on month. Over 25 per cent of the customers are repeat customers.
The team
The team LabsAdvisor consists of 15-members and a day is divided into many small chunks. Bhatia believes that one has to continuously improve the technology platform, ensure best in class customer service, look at various marketing activities as well as continue to hire great people. The average age of the team is in late 20s so the atmosphere in the office is always fun and energetic.
Road ahead
LabsAdvisor has started expansion in other big cities in India. However, Bhatia informed that as of now the venture has no plans of merger or acquisition and completely focusing on building a sustainable platform that offers the repertoire of tests in the country.
“Our expansion plans are very aggressive and in the next two years, we want to be the primary platform to book diagnostic tests in the top six metros in the country, concluded Bhatia.
