They started ambulatory services firm after losing loved one, today saving lakhs of lives

Incepted in 2017, Medulance was initiated as a bootstrapped venture to resolve India's inefficient and non-accessible emergency response service. Since then, the emergency response service provider has witnessed an upward trend in growth charts and profits. In fact, over the last five years, Medulance has successfully assisted over eight lakh lives with the strong support of our more than 75,000 technology-enabled ambulances, trained paramedics, and drivers.

Pranav Bajaj, Co-Founder, Medulance in an exclusive interview with Bizz Buzz, says, "Along with providing quality ambulance services, we are relentlessly working to reduce the average turnaround time in emergencies. For this, we have placed GPS-enabled ambulances across tier-1 and tier-2 cities. While we started as an emergency response provider, we aim to expand our bouquet of services. As of now, our MeduAlert service includes healthcare services ranging from teleconsultation, home healthcare, diagnostic services, and e-pharmacy to mental wellness. Expanding our umbrella of offerings, we are making strides to be the one-stop solution for all healthcare needs."

What are the gaps and challenges in Indian emergency service space?

The emergency and ambulatory service sector in India is largely unorganized. The lack of awareness about first aid, inability to recall emergency numbers, and high response times are some factors that affect the overall service delivery and patient experience. Gradually, the ambulances in India are getting equipped with technology for quick tracking and immediate response in emergencies, but the pace of adoption is slow. Ambulances across the country must be equipped with the best and latest technology. I believe it will save more lives and minimize severe health complexities.

Additionally, the emergency service sector in India follows no standard practice for customer service. Moreover, we don't have a prominent national entity in emergency response as of now. It affects not only the quality of ambulance service but also accessibility. However, on the brighter side, the scenario is changing gradually. The public and private sector is forging alliances with private emergency service providers to strengthen the immediate medical response infrastructure in the country.

In climate conditions like floods how emergency service providers like you are strengthening their services to help people in a timely manner?

It goes without saying that every second counts in emergencies caused by natural disasters. To tackle such situations, we have been increasing fleet size and workforce to ensure that the nearest ambulances reach the affected location on time. Also, we organize special workshops and skill development sessions to train medical professionals for handling emergency medical conditions. And most importantly, stocking medical devices and essential equipment at the back end is another crucial practice that we follow to ensure zero delays and lapses in emergency situations.

How Medulance is using technology to reduce the turnaround time for patients?

In the emergency healthcare sector, response time is one of the most crucial factors that saves lives and ensures better prognosis. With an aim to reduce the turnaround time for patients, we have built a robust tech-based infrastructure that employs new-age technologies for location mapping and tracking. We've continuously employed these technologies to provide patients with the best emergency response service. Furthermore, all our ambulances are GPS-enabled which facilitates manual location mapping. Our call center executives use these tools to locate the nearest ambulance to the patient's location. Additionally, we've recently integrated what3words, a digital geocoding system that helps patients and our team identify the exact location across the country, even in areas with zero data connectivity.

How you forayed into big corporate partnerships within such less time?

India has a significant demand-supply gap in the emergency response sector. To resolve this, we have been providing a range of emergency response services through an ambulance fleet spread across India. While providing quality service, our extensive network ensures that our ambulances and a team of paramedics reaches the patient as soon as possible. We have an organized customer support system that helps us serve patients efficiently and effectively. On the one hand, we have dedicated a unique helpline numbers for our corporate partners. On the other hand, we have a Pan-India helpline at Medulance for the general public that serves more than sixty cities across India. The dedicated helpline numbers for our business-to-business and business-to-customer model help patients reach us easily and also reduce turnaround time. It enables us to serve people in emergencies, irrespective of time and location. Our quality service, trained paramedics, and widespread network of ambulances have helped us forge partnerships with some leading corporates to provide best-in-class emergency care to their employees. In fact, our clients can even opt for customized services that best suit their employees.

At Medulance, we strongly believe that quality care and support are two crucial factors in assisting emergency medical cases. Therefore, we follow strict SLAs and guidelines to ensure that we serve and assist in medical emergencies. This is another reason for our longstanding growth and partnerships with corporates across the country.

What are your plans for upcoming years? How are you going to upscale the game?

In the next few years, we intend to expand our ambulance fleet to 12,000 while reaching over 200 cities across India. By continuously enhancing our offerings, we expect our subscriber base to reach 50 million by FY24. Simultaneously, in addition to our PPP model with the Delhi government, we plan to collaborate with more State governments across the country. To achieve our short-term goal, we have been upscaling our internal tech infrastructure while expanding our ambulance fleet. We are currently developing smart ambulances and integrating them with cutting-edge technologies through partnerships with IoT, connected cars, home security solutions, and insurance companies. Along with this, we also plan to launch air ambulances to increase accessibility even in remote areas. In the next two years, we will set up over 150 medical rooms in amusement parks, shopping malls, residential societies, co-working spaces, and office spaces.

What challenges the company faced during its initial years?

As a one-its-kind venture in the public-dominated sector, our primary challenge was positioning ourselves as an on-demand ambulance service. However, we were relentless and continued our journey to make the emergency ecosystem tech-enabled. We had our first breakthrough with approval from ROKO Labs. From hereon, we started strengthening our technical and human resource infrastructure. Over the last few years, we have successfully expanded our services to government institutions, real-estate developers and even multinational organizations. Considering the absence of standardardization and quality, price and regulations in the sector, we are working to build a strong emergency infrastructure with the least possible response time. For now, we have been able to reduce the turnaround time from 30 to 11 minutes in Delhi, and we intend to achieve the same across the nation.

What was the mojo behind coming up with Medulance?

For years, I wanted to set up a venture of my own. Rather than setting up a business, I wanted to build something to create a social impact. In 2016, when our co-founder lost a loved one due to a lack of timely assistance, it made me realize that quick and reliable emergency responses can significantly impact one's life. In fact, reducing response time by even one minute can save over 1.5 lakh lives in a year. After this incident, I and Ravjot, the co-founder of Medulance, researched and found that emergency response in India is majorly unresponsive, unavailable, and unreliable. To resolve this, we stepped up to bring tech-enabled ambulatory services that reach the patients in the least time possible with Medulance. Our core intention is to facilitate best-in-class emergency medical assistance to people across India.

Medulance began as an idea to make ambulance availability and accessibility in the country as simple as booking a cab. We have come a long way since then. Honestly, it wasn't easy to step out of the corporate world and start working on something from scratch. However, it has been five years since I took that decision, and I am proud to see how Medulance has positively impacted so many families.

What are Medulance's recent brand developments?

In the last few months, we have forged partnerships with some leading tech-enabled solutions to enhance our response time and locate blood banks in emergencies. First, we have integrated What3words, a digital geocoding system on our app, to locate the patients accurately and timely. We have also teamed up with e-RaktKosh powered by Paytm to track blood availability across blood banks.