Ever experienced a hassle while booking appointments with doctors, over expensive medical consultations and surgeries and procedures? Well, this is the startup that has the solution for all these problems. ShopDoc, is a startup that is launching around 1000 virtual smart health clinics across 941 panchayat towns and 87 municipal towns across Kerala. ShopDoc will be providing various services such as consultation with doctors, low-cost surgeries/procedures, and many more. To know more about these health-giving services, let us read more about them.
Give us a brief introduction about Shopdoc. What problem does it solve?
ShopDoc is a platform for smart health clinics. It primarily solves inefficiencies in the patient referral process and ineffectiveness in doctor deployment. India is the country where we have a shortage of over 55,000 primary health centers and nearly 600,000 allopathic doctors. We are building ShopDoc that allows practitioners to set up a smart health clinic almost instantly, and also enables them to practice at multiple such smart health clinics on the network and manage everything in one place. We currently have more than 200 smart health clinics live on our platform and around 3000 practitioners.
What are the services ShopDoc offers?
From telehealth consultations to the medical procedure marketplace for patients, and the most inexpensive digitization and productivity software for healthcare practices and practitioners.
How has the pandemic helped or shaped your business?
ShopDoc was earlier known as MobeedCare, a healthcare marketplace for eye, ear, and dental care products and services. Covid has forced us to pivot from MobeedCare to ShopDoc.
What are the future trends or changes in the health tech area you foresee?
Blockchain technology-driven data-protected platforms where patients will have absolute control over their data. We are indeed more excited about web3, smart clinics, and hospitals on metaverse platforms, etc, at the same time we are equally concerned about the mental and emotional health problems that will arise due to the emergence of these technologies.
What are some of the challenges you had to face to start the venture?
I’ve been part of vision care and eye care segments in the healthcare industry for over 17 years across the Middle East, Europe, and Australia. I have also been actively part of not-for-profit healthcare charity and community services activities since 2014, being one of the founding trust members and senior directors of Rights Charitable Trust. These two experiences have given me great insight into the problems the healthcare sector is facing in the country. Shortage of doctors and quality primary health centers, and non-existent patient referral systems led to increased cost of healthcare as more patients ended up relying more on multi-specialty hospitals for the problems that could have
been solved at primary care itself.
Tell us about your team and how did you meet?
My co-founder Razik Ashraf is my best friend in life who had earlier worked for Dubai Health Authority, and the other co-founder Zahid Makaniyil is my own younger brother who is experienced in designing and building software products for the healthcare industry.
Have you raised funding? If yes, then we would like to know the details. If not then please tell us if you’re looking to raise?
We still have not raised any external funding for ShopDoc India, however, a seed fund of $1.35 million was raised last year to establish and develop our middle east entity based in Dubai, which will have entirely different products focusing solely on mental health serving the global market.
What are your future plans and goals for ShopDoc?
This year, we are launching 1000 virtual smart health clinics across 941 panchayat towns and 87 municipal towns across Kerala, these are franchises operated by ShopDoc Angels, the women micro-entrepreneurs selected, trained, and deployed by ShopDoc.
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