In its five-year journey, Founder Rohit Mohta’s Lifecarehealth.com has served more than 5 lakh families, catering to their regular refills needs.
Lifecarehealth.com (previously Lifcare Pharmacy) started out in 2015 as a subscription pharmacy for chronic patients, focussing on the refill needs of Diabetic, Cardiac, Neuro, Nephro, etc. patients. Starting out from Jaipur where then Chief Minister Smt Vasundhara Raje recognized the company as the best healthcare startup in Rajasthan, Lifecare focussed on North India, capitalizing on the density of operations in states of Rajasthan, UP & NCR.
The company has since expanded offerings for members across hospital pharmacies, teleconsultation, and lab tests, but the focus has always been on medicine delivery. Lifecarehealth.com is backed by India’s top Venture Capital firms, like Saif Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, ILFS, and marquee angel investors like Rajul Garg, Kunal Shah, Alok Mittal, etc.
With the COVID-19 crisis completely changing the game for startups and businesses into digital health, Rohit Mohta, Founder and COO, Lifecarehealth.com opens up on his experience during the crisis and the acceptance of Digital Healthcare in India – a permanent change that happened by chance.
Q: How did the lockdowns impact the number of patients and their reasons for reaching out for services like medicine refill, teleconsultation, and health coach?
The crisis at hand is unprecedented, but it also fired up the acceptance and adoption of digital health. Building blocks of what will become India Health Stack are hot in discussion boards across healthcare companies. While this is at play, all of us are also using cues to understand how consumer behaviors in the health sector might undergo a change. Let’s do a deep-dive into each of them.
The crisis at hand is unprecedented, but it also fired up the acceptance and adoption of digital health.
Rohit Mohta, Founder and COO, Lifecarehealth.com
Medicine refill – The lockdown ushered in both short term and long-term consumer behavior changes. In the short term, chronic patients stocked up at least 2-3 months’supply of medicines, which lead to a spike in demand in early April. Adoption of online ordering and home deliveries increased, traffic on all platforms saw a surge, and pricing was not a determinant in the channel of ordering any more. In fact, all online platforms lowered the level of discounting and even then, witnessed a surge in volumes. This adoption, in the long run, will be a permanent change, shifting the consumer base from 2-3% to about 12-15% online.
Pre-COVID-19, tele-consultations had largely seen traction from a segment of mental & sexual health care cases, derma (mostly acne), or considered rural access to metro doctors. In terms of regulations, it was in a grey area as well. Covid-19 lead to first accepting the need for tele-consultation as a mainframe and then regulatory clearance framed the way for organizing the sector. But the volumes for tele-consultation platforms have not seen a great spike, as they were never ready with the General Physician (GPs) infrastructure. In-fact we can see a trend of patients doing tele-consultations directly with their doctors without the use of platforms (if their doctors don’t insist otherwise, which they don’t). For platforms that do this, there is an uptick of transactions.
The mental health sector has always been a taboo in our society. First, it is difficult for someone to accept that they need help and then to reach out & open up. Experts believe that the pandemic will have a serious bearing on mental health across the country. What needs to be looked at, is how many of them reach out to consultants (mental health coaches) for help. On physical health coaching, some of the discretionary spendings may see tapering in line with income tapering.
Digital adoption, in the long run, will be a permanent change, shifting the consumer base from 2-3% to about 12-15% online.
Rohit Mohta, Founder and COO, Lifecarehealth.com
Q: What challenges did you face in catering to the sudden increased demand?
While the orders were increasing during the lockdown, delivering them became very difficult. With state borders being sealed from time to time and delivery boys scared to run on the field, delivery service was under tremendous pressure. During the first few days, we got support from the local administration in terms of e-passes for essential services, but the people part was still in a bottleneck. Third-party services were affected for TAT, consumer wait times increased.
With state borders being sealed from time to time and delivery boys scared to run on the field, delivery service was under tremendous pressure.
We saw the highest return rate during the first two months, primarily from delay deliveries and customers placing multiple orders across various operators(maybe just the uncertainty of delivery was playing hard). Supply, though, was not much choked from the pharma side yet, the manpower exodus from NCR started playing havoc in supplies from distribution houses. Everyone was scrambling with low manpower and service levels were down at both demand & supply ends. Most of it smoothened out in June though.
Watch: Lifecarehealth.com’s offerings
Q: What kind of long-term impact can you see due to this crisis in your field of business?
The acceptance of the online mode of the order will bring a consumer behavior change for sure. As we understand that the virus is probably here to stay with us for some time, retail will see less foot traffic than before. Social distancing, the fear of catching the virus & the availability of contactless delivery will make a permanent move towards convenience & safety of online delivery.
Therefore, frontend stores will be under dual pressure. First, less footfall leading to lower sales, and second, more online adoption leading to pricing pressure. 30-35% of any pharmacy store sales are on account of FMCG products, many of them being impulse purchases. It surely too will see some impact with consumers willing to spend less time at the store. For instance, an average Apollo store holds about 40-50% space for consumers to stand & explore FMCG/private label products. There is no prescription demand for these products and they are completely dependent on impulse purchase of the consumer spending time at the store & exploring packaging labels across products… all this is expected to change. Home delivery pressure on a front-end store is expected to increase with consumers resorting to ordering over the phone/WhatsApp. This could account for about 30-40% of the store revenues. A build-up in the team for delivery will be warranted.
In current times, since convenience & safety have become more paramount than pricing, certain tapered discounts from e-pharmacies are expected to be sustainable. This, in the long term, could lead to parity in discounts offered by online & offline stores.
Social distancing, the fear of catching the virus & the availability of contactless delivery will make a permanent move towards convenience and safety of online delivery.
Q: What is your message to upcoming founders who are looking at building start-ups in the Healthcare sphere?
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise, for the pandemic, you would want to use it and not be engulfed by it. The current environment presents new threats and opportunities in terms of healthcare. It will definitely require new models to work within hospital and clinic OPD management, tele-consultation, insurance, diagnostics, or delivery. COVID-19 and its pressure on Indian healthcare only put healthcare at the center, and this concentration is here to stay for some time. Build slow, build cautious. Think of the startup more as a healthcare business than e-commerce.
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