Wellness on demand

Starting as a doctor-patient chat platform, Medibuddy has evolved to be India's largest on-demand, full-stack digital health care platform

- Nirmal Jovial

In 2010, Satish Kannan and Enbasekar D., two undergraduate students from IIT Madras, took part in a national student innovation competition. They had previously worked together on building an unmanned aerial vehicle for aerial surveying similar to the one Aamir Khan's character Rancho flew in the 2009 film 3 Idiots. But for the competition, they pivoted to health care, developing a compact ECG device.

The device could connect directly to a mobile phone, enabling patients to monitor their heart health conveniently. If irregularities were detected, the device would send an SMS alert. Their project won the competition, but more important, the project put the duo in touch with a lot of doctors, who advised them on the project.

While visiting the doctors, Satish and Enbasekar noticed patients enduring long waits just for brief consultations. "We discovered that many patients were making long, arduous trips to Chennai from remote parts of Tamil Nadu for follow-up appointments," said Enbasekar. "They would then spend hours waiting, only to have a quick consultation. This experience underscored the urgent need to improve health care access, inspiring us to tackle this issue. With mobile phones and software starting to evolve around that time, we began our startup journey."

Enbasekar added that back when he was a student, he relied on laptops and Google Talk to share notes, exchange questions and even make plans with his peers. "This got us thinking-why doctors and patients did not use such tools? However, we realised that many doctors didn't use laptops and were often too busy for email communication," he said.