Dentist At Your Doorstep

Mobident, India’s First Portable Dental Chain Is Aiming Towards Making Dental Care Both Accessible and Affordable

- Bhavik Nair and Shilpa Elizabeth Abraham

 

A visit to the dentist doesn’t always evoke a happy response. Dental procedures are painful, time consuming and expensive. You don’t want to go unless you are in unbearable pain and the annual check-ups are almost never done.

You can’t blame the dentists – exorbitant cost for dental treatment is a result of high cost of setting up a clinic. A high-end dental chair today costs about ₹6 lakh. Then, there is the cost of real estate which again is very expensive in India. Like any other medical set up, a dental clinic too takes its own sweet time to get established and bring in a steady flow of patients. Given its high costs and low asset utlisation, setting up a dental clinic is not the most lucrative business.

Dr. Devaiah Mapangada set up his dental practice with a single dental chair back in 1993 for ₹ 9 lakhs in Brigade Road, at the heart of Bengaluru city. He ran a reasonably successful practice, but in his quest for furthering his professional edge, he moved to Zurich, Switzerland to attend a fellowship programme for a year and a half. One of the topics he was dealing with as part of the programme was the delivery of dental care at homes.

However, even in Europe at the time technology was still catching up, even though the need for such a service was pronounced. When he came back to India upbeat about servicing the home-segment, he realised the market wasn’t ripe yet, so he settled down with his conventional practice once again. By 2008, he started sensing the winds of change.

Many of Mapangada’s patients included senior citizens who often called him to their homes for treatments. “Some of them were over 90 years old,” says Mapangada. As Bengaluru was growing, some of his patients dispersed throughout the city. And their need for his services spurred him to think about delivering dental care to people’s homes seriously.