Medlife Acquires HealthTech Startup EClinic24/7; To Invest $100 Mn for E-Pharma Expansion
Bangalore-based online e-pharmacy firm Medlife has announced that it has acquired EClinic24/7, a Bengaluru-based health technology startup company founded by Jeyandran Venugopal, an ex- Amazon and B S Prabhakar, an ex-Yahoo executive.
The acquisition comes with a couple of months after an anther online pharmacy player NetMeds had acquired JustDoc, a Bangalore-based telemedicine portal, in September.
EClinic24/7 is a telemedicine platform that connect its users with doctors for a Video consult, Voice call, Chat or Email/Web based consults.
The financials of the acquisition was not disclosed. The acquisition is part of Medlife’s plans of offering an enhanced and seamless healthcare experience in e-consultation on the Medlife platform for both patients and doctors.
Started in 2015 by by Singularity Healthcare IT Systems Pvt. Ltd., EClinic24/7 claims to be the first and only provider in India in this space offering fully compliant, digitally signed e-prescriptions as a part of the consultations. It also boasts a cloud based Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform that underlies the consultation experience and integrates the latest standards in clinical data storage and retrieval.
Speaking on the acquisition, Tushar Kumar, Founder and CEO, Medlife said, “Our acquisition of EClinic24/7 will allow us to create a disruption in the e-consultation space with an enhanced offering to our customers. EClinic24/7 has been recognised as a NASSCOM Emerge 50 company and has developed a fantastic technology platform that has the potential of transforming the healthcare paradigm in our country. The acquisition will also add to our future revenues with e-consultation contributing to 5 to 10 per cent of our overall business in the near future.”
Besides tje acquisition, Medlife, which currently has 1500 specialist doctors working for it, also announced to make an investment of $100 million in order to expand its e-pharmaceutical network around the country.
Medlife was initially started as a drug delivery mechanism and eventually evolved into an online doctor consultation and laboratory service. The company plans to set up one diagnostic lab in both Mumbai and Delhi by the end of December 2018. Currently, it has one centre in Bengaluru.
According to Prashant Singh, Founder and Director, Medlife “e-consultation will provide a huge impetus to the people and the benefits are multifold – 24X7 access to more specialised and experienced doctors particularly for people in smaller towns and villages, customised consultation, second opinion, privacy, etc. And, importantly saving time and travel cost will be huge for a patient. With the penetration of smartphones and network coupled with the fact that it has done well in countries like China, US etc. we are quite buoyant about this segment of Healthcare.”
Medlife will integrate the EClinic24/7’s technology on the Medlife platform from December 2018. The users can get immediate care by consulting a general physician or a specialist doctor on the platform and choose video/voice calls, email or chat through the Medlife App, website or voice dial in. Patients will have the added gaurantee of verified and competent doctors. Presently there are over 1500 doctors on the Medlife platform alone and it plans to add over 10,000 doctors in the next one year.
Commenting on the acquisition, Jeyandran Venugopal, Founder, EClinic24/7 said, “At EClinic24/7, with our deep experience in technology, we developed a robust consumer internet technology platform. Along with experienced healthcare experts we were able to scale the technology offering to a complete and easy to use platform. We are glad that Medlife, the market leaders in e-pharmacy in India have come forward to take this technology platform to a wider customer base. With the integration of Medlife platform we are confident that it will set new standards in India’s e-consultation market.”
Source: IndianWeb2
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