HealthSprint plans tie-up with microinsurers for rural services

HEALTHCARE IT services company Health-Sprint plans to expand its reach a hundred-fold in two years to five lakh patients a month and take e-health services to rural areas in tie-ups with microinsurance providers. By then, it expects to be connected through its internet portal to 1,000 hospitals, 2,000 pharmacies and 2,500 diagnostic centres, Brahmesh D Jain, one of the three co-founders, said. Among the 150 hospitals it currently has tieups with are the Manipal Group of Hospitals, the Wockhardt Group and St Johns Medical College Hospital. Through its portal, HealthSprint provides services such as the exchange of healthcare data, including health insurance procedures, searches for a specialists, scheduling appointments with doctors, securing medical reports and getting prescriptions online directly from hospitals. It also helps connect customers with labs and pharmacies in the neighbourhood. Its e-health services for rural areas will be launched in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh by connecting rural hospitals to those in metropolitan cities and rural customers with microinsurance companies. It is in the process of tying up SKS Microfinance and the SEWA women’s cooperative federation in Gujarat for the venture. “The idea is to provide a laptop, a scanner and a printer to rural hospitals, which will help to communicate the healthcare data to microinsurance companies and tertiary hospitals,” Dr Jain said. HealthSprint also has a tie-up with Yos Technologies to collaborate for creation and maintenance of personal health records. The company’s health insurance information exchange platform is for patients whose hospitalisation expenses are settled directly by the insurance company. Its corporate healthcare platform allows firms to manage pre-employment and annual health checkups for employees online. For pre-policy health checkups, insurance companies can schedule appointments online for potential customers with networked labs and secure reports for underwriting policies speedily.

Source: The Economic Times