One quote stood out like a punch in the gut—“Would you trust your child to be treated by a doctor with one or two years of experience?” That, in essence, is the battle India’s healthtechs are facing. Since 2016, India has seen at least 19 teleconsultation companies crop up. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, big players like Reliance Industries, the Tata Group, and Apollo Hospitals have made a beeline to house services like teleconsultation, digital prescriptions, e-pharmacies, and at-home diagnostics under one roof. India also ranks fourth globally for healthtech investments in this period, with venture capitalists putting in $4.4 billion in the last five years. Clearly, everyone’s trying to get in on the teleconsultation opportunity. But running a healthtech involves more than just facilitating one-on-ones with doctors and patients. It needs doctors who can tell one type of code from another. It needs doctors who can crunch medical data. It needs doctors who can clearly articulate the kind of tech problem they’re facing, so that the engineers can fix it. It needs doctors who can look at an X-ray and tell the engineer what medical issue to build mathematical models for. As it is, India’s healthcare industry is running on fumes. India needs at least 1.8 million doctors, nurses, and midwives to meet the minimum requirement of 44.5 professional health workers per 10,000 people, as per WHO standards. Currently, this number stands at 17.2. And while the number of undergraduate seats in medical colleges has increased 75% since 2014, that's hardly enough. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has even promised to set up one medical college in every district in the next 10 years. In this milieu, forget finding doctors with a tech bent of mind; just finding enough doctors has been a headache for healthtechs. And it doesn’t help that the existing pool of doctors is naturally drawn toward in-person clinical practice, the rocky doctor-shortage - road that Indian healthtechs are travelling on..
