Siddharth has been a national Lawn Tennis player. He has also represented his university at many state and national level events and won trophies. His passion for the sport had led him to study Sports Business Management, which took him to Ottawa, Canada. The reason being the small number of universities offering the course in India and that too not as advanced as was being offered abroad. But after finishing the course he felt the need to be working for and in his own motherland. Hence, he left the option to get a job and permanent residency in Canada and came back to India at the first opportunity.
Siddharth did his BBA-IT from SEMCOM College, Gujarat, before going to Ottawa, Canada where he pursued his Ontario Graduate Certificate Course in Sports Business Management. After returning to India, he joined Vibrant Gujarat Sports University, Gandhinagar. He played an important role in the Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2012 as an assistant to the Vice Chancellor of the Sports University. foreign universities.
But then, he listened to the call of inner self, quit his government job and started his own venture with his brother, healthrecordsindia.com
In an exclusive convesation with LifeBeyondNumbers, Siddharth Panchal talks about the inception of their venture, their future plans, challenges they faced and much more…
Inception of healthrecordsindia.com
One of my friends was struggling with Kidney cancer while I was in Canada. When I came back to India, I saw that friend and his family devastated with the Cancer thing. But the other problem was that the cancer was a very rare type of kidney cancer. Hence he and his family had to move around a lot of cities for expert opinions carrying a big bunch of blood reports, CT Scans, PET Scans etc. We tried to find out a solution in which we could actually use internet and send all the records to the doctors everywhere. But we failed to find a good solution to this problem. Eventually my friend passed away due to the complications of cancer. That was when me and my brother, who is a surgeon, had decided to build an online personal health records solution, which would cater to the needs of the Indian patients. And that is how healthrecordsindia.com came into existence.
What is healthrecordsindia.com
Healthrecordsindia.com is a web based, electronic, personal health records solution. It is a patient centric and doctor conducive model. The primary authentication of the records profile remains with the patient himself. The patient can then share the records with anyone that he or she wants. The website was launched on 15th August 2013 and has been fully operational since then. Presently, healthrecordsindia.com is working under Aadhyaa Healthcare Services, and is a bootstrapped company.
Team healthrecordsindia.com consists of me as CEO, Dr. Saurabh Panchal, Mentor and COO, Harshil Rawal, VP Strategy and Harsh Doshi, Lead Developer. Healthrecordsindia.com has garnered a lot of traction in Vadodara city, and we are hence planning to extend our target to other cities as well. We are in advanced talks to many hospitals in and around Baroda for management of health records of their patients.
Healthrecordsindia.com believes that the patients shall be free of the hassles of scanning all their records. Hence, healthrecordsindia.com provides free pickup service from anywhere in India. For the pickups, we have tied up with FedEx so that we can have the best hands available to transport the important medical records.
Healthrecordsindia.com provides customized envelopes designed and developed by us specifically for the purpose of transport of health records. The envelopes are multi-layered and manufactured by one of the vendors, who has been manufacturing envelopes for the Indian Government for the mailing of passports.
Aadhyaa Healthcare Services also runs another venture called doctors@home, which provides services like at home doctors, pharmacy, laboratory, Xrays, ECG, etc. to individuals and Corporates at the client’s own place at their own time.
Challenges and Learning
We took around a year to research and develop the model. India is a country where people don’t trust newbies in market. And when you are a start-up, people see you with an eye of suspicion. Yeh mere paise leke bhaag to nahijaaega?! (laughs…).
One of the challenges that we faced was, to setup an online payment gateway. You require a credit card to setup an online payment gateway. And credit card requires that you submit 3 years’ IT returns to the bank. If I am a start-up how come I am going to have 3 years IT returns? Similar challenges have plagued the Indian system, which makes life difficult for a start-up. Other challenge was to find sufficiently experienced programmers for our website, which again is a very difficult task in this part of the country. But still the challenges that we have faced have made the journey more exciting and enjoyable. These are the times that have made us learn a lot.
The Way Ahead
Healthrecordsindia.com is trying to fill a huge gap in the Indian Healthcare System. We persevere to create value for the patients. We want to educate people and make them aware about the importance of maintaining the personal health records.
Healthrecordsindia.com is a patient centric model, where the patient maintains the records themselves. It obliterates the need of the Electronic health records system of multiple healthcare providers to be compatible with each other. Any healthcare provider can directly view the records of the patient without the need of any software installations. Hence, few years down the line we see ourselves as catering to many thousands and maybe hundred of thousands of people to help them manage their personal health records.