DoctorC, a tech-driven diagnostics company providing healthcare services, say they have done their bit by supporting the public with their efficient home services during the pandemic.
Neehar Cherabuddi, CEO, who co-founded the Hyderabad-based DoctorC in 2014 believes that balancing design and technology is an art. Neehar, who has always been entrepreneurial, has been part of three startups in the Bay Area – WebMynx, Sleepyhead, and Shoutt. He started the venture to design healthcare services for the Indian consumer.
A Brown University grad, he worked for five years in Silicon Valley as a Senior Software Engineer at Oracle Corporation. Was the company always digital-ready? What kind of changes did they have to do to fit into the new normal, between March 2020 to March 2021?
“We are a tech-first healthcare provider to address the problem that all healthcare services in India were not designed for consumers. We built the company to deliver the most consumer-centric healthcare services online, at home, and at a provider, in that order. Even before COVID, consumers of healthcare were moving online faster than ever before,” he says.
“The healthcare industry is quickly following in the footsteps of the transportation industry and the food industry which had a huge market transformation in the last five years with Ola, Uber, Swiggy and Zomato. COVID has accelerated this transformation. The government is also pushing for telemedicine and supporting at-home medicine delivery & testing,” he adds.
At the onset of COVID-19, they had 150+ employees and had a strong digital infrastructure. The pandemic has led to a rapid expansion of the company across verticals and today they are a 300-strong family. “Our growth post-COVID is attributed to understanding our consumers extremely well and delivering the highest quality of healthcare to them. We had to make the following changes in order to keep up with the sharp rise in demand for digital healthcare,” he adds.
Growth component
Operating in 10 cities across six states, we had to ensure that we were aware of and in compliance with the latest guidelines issued by both ICMR and the respective State Governments, which were changing on a regular basis, says Neehar. They had to strengthen their team across all verticals: healthcare specialists, sales and support executives, and engineering. They now stand at 320+ employees.
City’s response
How did the average Hyderabadi take to the sudden normal of everything going digital? As a company that has been operating for a few years now, did you see any pattern in the way the citizens embraced it?
“We have observed that Hyderabad is ahead of other cities in the adoption of digital healthcare services. We are one of the largest diagnostics providers in the city. As a result, we understand consumers in the city extremely well, and we are known for providing industry-leading customer satisfaction. This is highlighted by our stellar Net Promoter Score of 75+, which is higher than even some of the most customer-centric global companies like Netflix (68), Amazon (62), Airbnb (74),” explains Neehar.
