New report shows teleconsultations up 25% post-lockdown

Udaipur : myUpchar, India’s fastest growing health start-up announced today that its teleconsultations arm has continued to grow in the post-lockdown phase.

The healthtech company witnessed a growth of 25% in the three months since July, while it had previously reported a 300% growth during the lockdown period. This is contrary to popular expectations. The data is based on a first-of-its-kind report by myUpchar on the state of teleconsulting in Bharat.

Titled “Emergence of Teleconsultation in Bharat: How Bharat has leveraged Teleconsultation since lockdown”, the new report collates data over six months till September 2020, consisting of the lockdown and post-lockdown phases, to glean important insights into who is using teleconsultation today, where, how much and for what.

Some salient points to come out of this report are:

• Consultations for dependants—that is, children under 18 and parents over 60—grew 80% after the lockdown was lifted, in a huge vote of confidence from the patients’ guardians.
• 90% of teleconsultation requests on myUpchar come from people living outside the major metros and capital cities; with more than half coming from Tier 3 and beyond.
• Expectedly, teleconsultation requests are higher in states that have poorer health scores and infrastructure.
• More and more women are seeking medical advice via teleconsulting. While women in Tier 1 are the largest female customer base for the company currently, encouragingly, more women from Tiers 2, 3 and 4 are starting to reach out now.
• Over 64% of patients asked for online consultations with an allopathic doctor from June-August 2020. The share of Ayurveda consultations was 24.3% and Homoeopathy, 11.4%, in this period.

Releasing the report, the founders of the company – Rajat Garg and Manuj Garg – credited the sustained rise in teleconsultations to growing trust in teleconsulting, the quality of experience that myUpchar offers and a positive shift in people’s perception of online health services in the post-Covid world.

The founders also felt that the government’s Telemedicine Practice Guidelines helped cement this position in a big way, by removing doubts and uncertainties in the minds of experienced doctors and specialists.

“India’s telemedicine industry had been chugging along for over 15 years. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, our doctors rose to the challenge of providing healthcare to people who had Covid-like symptoms as well as patients who couldn’t access regular health centres and clinics during the lockdown,” said Dr Manuj Garg, co-founder, myUpchar. “It’s a credit to our doctors that they handled the surge in consultations with such integrity and compassion. We are seeing the results of their efforts in terms of repeat consultations and more confidence among users. It helps that our partner chemists and labs were able to fill prescriptions and run tests during and after the lockdown with alacrity and precision.”