A simple graphical representation of my portal’s Live Chat with a Doctor feature…

According to the latest issue of “Outlook Business” magazine, the healthcare services in India’s private hospitals is getting world class. However, the customer service at the same private hospitals is not able to catch up with the rapid developments in the infrastructure of the hospital. The patients are happy with the patient care but they are still unhappy with the quality of customer care they get. Waiting in the queue, doctor not available on time, payment hassles etc.

A new trend that is coming up in this eco-system of traditional healthcare delivery through Hospitals / Clinics is “Online Healthcare”. The doctors and hospitals can look at this as a channel that filters the patients and then forwards them to the doctors and hospitals for treatment.

Online Healthcare includes a few important aspects as mentioned below. At the core of the system is a central web-site or portal.

• It provides an access to doctor online for Live Chat. The patients can use the Internet and chat with the doctor. The doctors can provide medical advice to handle the current situation and then refer the patient to the nearest hospital and doctor in their locality. Doctors also provide answers for the common medical queries.

• It provides patient generated reviews about the hospitals and doctors and also the contact details of the doctors and hospitals.

• It provides a Forum where people of similar health problems can discuss with each other.

• The website also provides content in the form of answers to common queries, which the patients might have.

• The website has common health tools and price listings for the common medical procedures in hospitals.

• Patients can buy medicine over the Internet and it will be delivered to their home.

Such trend is already popular in the USA and Europe. Many websites like WebMD is widely used worldwide. In India, HealthcareMagic has recently started this service and has already referred hundreds of patients for OPD and IPD procedures in Bangalore.

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What brand of shirt & trouser do you wear?  Allen Solly, Van Heusen, Polo! Each costing you atleast a couple of thousand bucks!! How often do you go to restaurants, pubs? Once in a week, twice in  week, costing atleast 500 Rs each time.

Irrespective of whether you are a young bachelor, or a young couple  recently married & having one or no kids or you are a middle aged person with a high school going child, there’s no denying that the spending pattern of the Indians have changed a lot in the last few years. Everyone spends on br&ed products. The local tailors have long perished at the on-set of major apparel br&s. India is on a move. Everyone earns decent amount of money in the metros. Thousand rupees has no value today in the metros.

Have you ever thought how we react when we talk about the spend on Healthcare. My God!! His fees is 400 bucks. He just made a big hole in my budget. My goodness, this medicine costs 94 Rs. I stopped the Antibiotics because I got well in 2 tablets. You know what - each tablet costed 14 bucks. The Doctors these days just give you expensive medicine!!

Come on, I just want to ask these so called Rising Indian Middle Class. They can spend thousands on a shirt, thousands on a massage, facial, pedicure, hair cut; lakhs on a foreign trip. But when it comes to their own health, it seems they become the same old small town middle class hesitant to spend every penny they have. It is very surprisng to see people cribbing for Doctors fees, medicine cost etc when their vehicles would have guzzled up more petrol in reaching the Doctor & hospital. It’s all in the mind. Service industry is still in shambles because people don’t want to pay unless it becomes a question of life & death. Very few people buy health insurance on their own, citing reasons like their company gives them an insurance coverage already. How small is that corporate provided insurance, nobody cares.

Is it time when we start taking our health as seriously as we purchase our shirt or buy a pizza!! How many of the people over 30 actually go for a full body check up each year? How many have ever paid for it? Everyone is looking for FREE items when it comes to his/her own health. According to a survey, 90% of the young people in Bangalore have undergone health check up only because the health insurance company mandated them to get it done for free. Had it been a paid service, again, very few of these 90% would have been even insured.

Interesting to read such findings but it is time when we start allocating a certain percentage of our income. Even 2-5 Rs. per day to take care of our health coverage for life. People need to understand that health is not a one time down-payment item. It needs to be invested throughout the life time. Why become so stingy when it comes to our own health.

HealthcareMagic launched it’s new product BabyMagic Beta last week. Some people have asked us questions so thought of consolidating them here. BabyMagic is still in BETA, please visit and give me your feedback on comments or send me a mail on Shekhar@HealthcarecareMagic.com

What is Baby Magic?

Baby Magic is a personalized portal to provide information to prospective parents, pregnant mothers and to the parents who have children within the age group of 1 to 3 years. The portal will provide week by week information about what to expect when you are expecting. The precautions, the myths, common remedies, Dos and Don’ts. The portal also provides similar information on a month on month basis for babies from 0 months to 36 months.

What is Unique About it?

The BabyMagic portal has a “chat with a doctor” feature. If the parents have any question while reading the content on our portal or have any specific query related to conception, infertility, pregnancy, vaccination and child care, the parents can click “chat with a doctor” button and have live chat with a doctor in REAL TIME.

What are the new features coming up?

The beta launch has only static content. Going further, parents can subscribe to a newsletters and they will get a weekly email (during pregnancy) and monthly newsletter and vaccination reminder (after child birth). If the parents (and expecting parents) require appointment fixing with gynaecologists, paeditricians and infertility specialists, they can do it through the portal.

So what is it finally?

A complete package for “celebrating parenthood”. A must-register feature. Your Child is Special. What’s more, it is totally FREE.

Been busy, very busy for long time… Lost my blog’s DB & all posts as it was secretly hosted on my college hosting for last 1.5 years and those buggers have deleted my domain folder from the hosting… anyways… In the mean time, I quit my last company and… started my own company…

I’m glad to inform you about my new venture www.HealthcareMagic.com

Usually we come across this situation when we’re looking for a Doctor or Hospital in the nearby location? Wondering whether the Doctor is good or bad? How do his patients rate him? Worst, you want to crib about a Doctor who gave you all those costly medicines for no bloody reason? Well, hit the wild web… and make your own decision!

And to help you out… I’ve recently launched the BETA version of HealthcareMagic. HealthcareMagic is India’s first Health 2.0 Portal bridging the gap between end-users like us and Healthcare services in an interactive, user-friendly way. HealthcareMagic allows live interaction between doctors and patients, and is a integrated comparison portal for health. Most importantly, the portal allows reviews of doctors/hospitals and Healthcare products/services. We’ve done the portal nicely and one can search for doctors/hospitals based on specialties/area code, as well as chat with doctors online. Currently the portal is Bangalore-only, we will be expanding the portal yo you city very soon.

On HealthcareMagic.com you can…

• Chat with a Doctor online for FREE!
• Doctors available Online from 9.00 AM - 9.00 PM IST
• Share your experiences, write reviews about Doctors & Hospitals you visited or know.
• Search & Compare Doctors & Hospitals in Bangalore
• Patient information are fully CONFIDENTIAL
• Interactive features like Health Calculators & Hospitalization Cost Calculators which helps you take your decisions
• HealthcareMagic Blog

Please share you views about the portal online or just leave me a note by replying me…
If you have any interesting feature in mind which you want to see on the portal, feel free to reach me directly on phone +91 9900230494

Thanks & Have a blessed day ahead…

PS: I’m still in process to finalize a theme for my blog… just experimenting with Fresh, might move back to iTheme.