The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and other Institutes recently conducted studies on lifestyle diseases and reported that the estimated proportion of all deaths due to Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) has increased from 37.09% in 1990 to 61.8% in 2016. Another independent study suggests that sixty million people fall below the poverty line annually in India due to delayed healthcare responses and costs; the economic burden of chronic diseases are likely to cross 6 trillion USD by 2030. With a doctor- patient ratio is less than the recommended WHO standard of 1:1000, India needs to change people’s behaviour to look inward at their health pre-emptively instead of just sickness-care. Making people aware of their health-risk from silent killers like heart attack, stroke, diabetes, where symptoms show up too late, empowers them to take timely corrective/preventive action.
Co-founded by Milind Naik, Dr. Tarun Ramole and Vikram Rai, Vitor Health is empowering individuals to become aware of one’s health, assess for silent chronic health risks.
Milind is a technology industry veteran with a 25+year stint including senior management and entrepreneurial roles. Dr Tarun is a clinician turned health entrepreneur with a 17+ year stint across various healthcare systems and healthcare product/service companies. Vikram combines a 16-year career with stints in technology companies followed by an entrepreneurial stint running a boutique consulting firm. The co-founding team brings long and relevant experience including founding and running of start-ups and leveraging extensive business and professional networks which are relevant and useful for Vitor Health’s scope of business.
Health Solutions
In the current times; digitising healthcare is the utmost priority for the Indian healthcare sector. This clubbed with the socio-economic impact Vitor Health can make, along with the scalability of its model only re-emphasises the importance of what it does! The traditional healthcare systems take care of the sick; whereas the wellness programmes, gyms, diets are for the elite. Between these two extremes, the average everyday people have hardly any options towards everyday management of health – this is the gap it plugs.
Vitor’s Health Risk Assessment Solution includes a portable screening kit that can be accessed anywhere and anytime at the customer’s convenience: home, workplace, at the neighbourhood pharmacy, store or practically anywhere! The test takes about 10minutes and an integrated health assessment with an instant report containing simple yet actionable inputs is dispensed at an affordable price point of less than Rs.200. It simplifies health assessment and lets one act on those risks in a timely fashion to minimize or completely mitigate chronic silent killer diseases.
The Teething Problems
Being a start-up, Vitor has had its fair share of early issues including:
- Establishing credibility of the disruptive healthcare concept that was being introduced: this was overcome by extensively participating in government and private competitions and contests, incubation programs etc. which helped establish product-market fit.
- Regulatory uncertainty due to entry into an untested market model, the alignment of regulations and statutory mandates was a concern. The company took extensive advise and legal counsel early in the evolution so as to minimize any needs to change/re-align the business model later.
- Access to good quality talent: This challenge was mitigated at Vitor Health by the founders’ ability to attract talent from the networks that they brought in – many of the founding team members have known the founders from earlier experiences. Hence quality and trust we pre-established.
Health @Work
Healthcare being a highly competitive and sensitive market, to maintain the vigour, there are certain cultural tenets infused in the organizational DNA of Vitor fostering behaviour of constant learning:
- The open and unrestricted culture encourages all employees to learn and disseminate knowledge with the intent to keep the company’s mission and purpose central to sharing relevant knowledge to everyone.
- The informal yet professional use of simple tools like social chat groups ensures quick knowledge-share, with self-imposed professionally relevant guidelines.
- The Know thy customer rule requires every employee to spend some part of their time in customer-facing activities. This is to ensure that the essence of what Vitor exists for, which is to be relevant to a customer, is personally felt and motivates the quality of their work.
Vitor Health maintains a motivation-centric and outcome-oriented culture. With this being the value system, it motivates the employees to have the highest degree of flexibility and support to achieve the outcomes. The open and non-hierarchical system, allows employees to have a good work-life balance, enjoy their work at Vitor and most importantly take good care of their and their families health – living the lives they offer to the customers.
Advising the Young
The co-founders, who are seasoned professionals and entrepreneurs, advice the younger lot to invest time in acquiring multi-disciplinary skills as an integral part of their commitment to succeed. They also suggest, “There are only 2 reasons for a business to exist: you are either solving a problem which no one else has solved earlier or you are solving a problem much better than anyone else. Always apply this filter to your entrepreneurial idea – set aside any ego while applying this filter.”
Towards a Healthy Future
There is a great degree of eco-system development for startups all across India. Right from the governments (central and states) to private entities like large companies to investors to incubators/accelerators, all of them are keen to engage with startups – so this seems to be the time to be a startup! Hence the next 5-10 years could be the golden period for a lot of innovation to be fostered by startups as the eco-system will provide confidence and risk support.
As far as Vitor is concerned, the team says, “Our ambition is to become the brand for Bharat to help millions of people avert, avoid, prevent or manage sickness – in the most efficient, empathetic and affordable manner. In short, make Bharat a WELLthy nation”
