An alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Pranay Jivarajka was the founding partner of ride-hailing firm Ola and an integral part of the company's leadership for close to a decade. Now he wants to make sexual health and wellness accessible to all and make it part of the mainstream through his healthcare start-up.
In a chat with Moneycontrol, Jivarajka, CEO of Allo Health, talks about the services on offer, the challenges he faces and his vision for the company and the sector. Edited excerpts:
How does your platform work and how do people access its services?
Allo Health is a digital clinic for sexual wellness. We have a full-stack business model. What I mean is that 97 to 98 percent of what we deal with in terms of patient queries and resolutions happens digitally.
By full stack, I mean is right from the discovery of the disorder to its diagnosis to getting a holistic evaluation around it, covering both mental and physical aspects, to consultation with a doctor or an expert around the problem, to creating a treatment plan for you, which is customised for every individual and includes medications, tests, therapies — everything is covered.
Also, there may be certain lifestyle recommendations, which might include some dietary changes, some basic lifestyle changes and some exercise in a few cases. We do this on a continuous basis till the time the problem is resolved or the patient starts seeing visible improvements.
Typically, the patient’s journey lasts for about two to three months. In a lot of cases, you don't even need any treatment. About 10 percent of the cases are largely around confusion and issues that people have purely because of a lack of sex education or knowledge about their sexual health. But there are some complex cases as well, which take anywhere from about four to six months. But for most of the cases, two to three months is a typical timeframe after which a majority of the cases see improvement.
When I say sexual wellness concerns, it is predominantly in men than women and largely revolve around erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation and desire issues. The issues among women are largely around vaginismus, pain during sex or desire issues. Then, you have issues around people being confused about their identity. They feel that they're asexual, but probably they're not and things like that. So this is how the landscape is and this is pretty much how the landscape is in the offline world as well, and this is how we do the treatment.
But fundamentally, if you look at our country there is a big gap when it comes to sex education. That is a very strong root cause for the problems that exist because people don't have clarity and then they have their own layers of assumptions on top of it, which leads to a lot of insecurity, leading to a lot of issues and a lot of cases.
Often, if you address the issues early on in the journey, the solutions are pretty simple. But as you move forward and as you delay things, the complexity increases. So Allo aims to normalise conversations around sexual wellness because anyone can have those issues and it has nothing to do with who you are as an individual and there's a lot of judgment, taboo and stigma associated with sexual disorders and sexual wellness concerns. We are doing our bit to normalise that and let people come out and get 100 percent science backed, clinically proven solutions around it.
Also read I Private health sector in India has grown because of huge gap in healthcare delivery: Alok Roy, chairman, Medica group of hospitals
Do you have doctors and counsellors who guide patients on your platform? How many doctors have you collaborated with?
Let me give some context here. India has less than 1,000 experts in the field of sexual medicine. And the country, to the best of our estimates, has about 150 million people who are silently suffering from some or other form of sexual disorder.
So that gives us a very sad truth that for every doctor, there are 1,50,000 patients, which is a very big gap. Hence, finding these doctors as a patient is also very difficult. A, I don't know which doctor to go to and, B, even if I know, finding one is not easy.
These doctors, by the way, are doing very good business and they are treating people and people are getting better. But apart from these, there are about 80-85,000 more people who claim that they can treat sexual concerns and these include about 70,000 quacks, 7-8,000 general physicians and another 7-8,000 alternate or traditional medicine doctors such as Homeopathy, Ayurveda or Unani. The main reason for their existence is the strong demand that people have and the lack of qualified experts in modern medicine.
I have nothing against any kind of medicine but evidence shows that in the case of alternate medicine, mostly it’s only the placebo effect, which means it may seem to be effective in some cases but most of the time it doesn't work.
Modern medicine, on the other hand, has fairly evolved to figure out what the root cause is, and there is a very precise solution around it. So this is what we are trying to digitise and make much more accessible to people.
So with that context, today we have about 15 specialist doctors on our platform and we have done around 7,000 consultations so far. The numbers are quite overwhelming for the size and phase where we are right now, and we're continuously working on building capacity. We also know that the number of doctors that we would need to scale our platform is not enough.
Not all of them would agree to work with us. They are doing their own business and are doing a great job in terms of helping people and creating an impact on their lives. So what we are also trying to do is standardise this entire process of triaging and make it much more scalable using technology.
Are partnerships with government entities on the cards?
We are eight months old in this business. At the moment, we are working very hard to make this scalable. As of now, we are mostly focusing on tier 1 towns but almost half of our business comes from tier 2 and 3 cities. So we first want to solidify the offering, create a pool of doctors through our internal training mechanisms, and create a decision support system using technology to help doctors enable better decision-making in every case.
We also need to create more personalised experiences for every individual, ensure that the teleconsultation that we use or the digital platform that we use is comforting enough for the patient, the doctors are empathising and treatments are more standardised. So we are partnering with lab test partners.
We have our own partner pharmacy from where we deliver the medicines. So the first thing is to make this entire sexual medicine more mainstream for both doctors and experts on one side so that more people opt for it. The other side is how to normalise conversations around it for individuals to come out and discuss their problems openly. Once we have that, joining hands with anyone who's interested in the mission is something that one would look forward to.
What are your plans for your platform, for your company? What exactly are you looking to do in the next two, three years?
The way I look at it is, what kind of impact can we create with what we are building? And what we are building is slightly complex in the sense that it involves multiple specialisations. So, sexual disorders could be an outcome of multiple root causes. It could be because of psychological, hormonal, biological, anatomical reasons and so on. Then there are behavioural reasons as well.
And the way our healthcare industry is organised today, it (sexual health) is not dealt by hospitals because most of the time sexual disorders do not lead to hospitalisation or surgery, which is not a very exciting proposition for hospitals because their business model revolves around the number of surgeries and the bed utilisation they have.
Similarly, for individual clinics, they have this fear of getting tagged as a sex clinic for a qualified doctor. Even if they practice, they don't say it. You will not find a board of a modern medicine doctor saying that it's a sex clinic or he's a sexologist because their other practices suffer. Let's say if there is a psychiatrist, who also deals with sexual health, he will not say it out loud. Very rarely you will see that. So I think as an industry, it is very underdeveloped and therefore we want to normalise conversations, and do a lot more around sex education and sexual health awareness, which will lead to people coming out and seeking a solution for their issues.
So to make this branch more mainstream, we need to create those opportunities for doctors who want to study this. Today, even if I want to study (sexual medicine), I don't have any future career opportunities. This is where we can help.
Also read: First indigenously developed CAR-T cell therapy could be the safest ever
Also, most of the public health systems abroad work like: you create protocols, train people on protocols and make sure that your intent is to get the patient out of the system as soon as you can. But the Indian healthcare system works in a very different way where once the patient is in, then you want to kind of, if I can use the phrase "milk it as much as you want, as much as you can" and then you leave the patient. So it's a very big mindset change for everyone that we work with today in the ecosystem. So these are some of the key priority areas that we would like to focus on for the next couple of years.
Do you also plan to start physical clinics?
What we have realised is that sexual health concerns are treatable in up to 97-98 percent of the cases digitally, but just to make sure that there is enough reach, we might end up partnering with a few clinics and creating a physical setup or leverage an existing physical infrastructure though it may not happen anytime soon. But eventually, whatever can take us closer to our patients, we will do that.
Checkout Budget Highlights 2023
