Hospido.in has launched Cancer Dost, an automated AI-enabled chatbot that gives free advice on all kinds of cancer treatment. This tool gains importance since India has a poor oncologist to patient ratio, and patients from smaller cities are often clueless about the variety of affordable treatment options. “The tool will usher in a new possibility of accessible cancer guidance that could transform the healthcare landscape globally,” says Karan Chopra, co-founder of hospido.in — the Gurgaon-based holistic cancer care helps cancer patients and caregivers, especially from smaller cities, to get easy access to the right treatment.
After an MBA from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, Chopra worked at a consultant firm for five years, and then quit to branch out on his own right before the pandemic occured. While toying with various ideas, he discovered the plight of cancer patients, and decided to provide them with a service, which led to Hospido. At present, Hospido has on board 100 cancer specialists from AIIMS, Medanta, Leaders in Oncology Care — LOC (UK), and MD Anderson Cancer Centre (USA) among others. The platform has also trained 12 local doctors and teams of nurses in five smaller cities, and “over 1,000 cancer patients have been helped,” says Chopra. Excerpts:
How did hospido come into being?
Hospido means hospital at your door. We started in May 2020, after the lockdown. That’s when we realised that about 60 per cent cancer patients who come for treatment to Delhi from smaller cities, had either dropped out of treatment or moved to inexperienced doctors in their own cities. Many were scared of coming to hospitals as these were Covid hotspots.
So, we started providing oncology focussed home care by training nurses to conduct minor procedures at home. We started chemotherapy centres in Amritsar, Agra, Gwalior, Kanpur and Jammu, as a big chunk of cancer patients come from these five cities. We connected cancer specialists with doctors in smaller places, who trained them to enable chemotherapy treatment for patients there. All this saves patients’ a lot of money, and keeps them away from contracting covid.
Why did you only focus on cancer?
My co-founder (Sunil Sachedva) is from Medanta, and gives me a lot of insights on what’s happening at hospitals. I noticed that cancer patients are the worst sufferers in the pandemic. Treatments like orthopaedics and elective surgeries can wait, but you cannot stop cancer treatment as its progression from say Stage 2 to Stage 4 is very rapid if the treatment is stopped. My grandmother was a cancer patient, so I know the pain they go through. Being more at risk, cancer patients cannot walk into hospitals.
But cancer treatment involves a high cost.
That is the reason most cancer patients drop out of treatment. To help patients raise money, we have collaborated with organisations like ImpactGuru.
You also have the Doctor on Call service.
Doctor on Call is focused on primary care, where a general physician will guide you through ailments like fever, cough, diarrhoea on the phone. We started it under our Swasthya Sewa Programme in July, and here too the entire base is Tier III cities and beyond. As of now, we have one lakh people on our platform. For `495 a year, a family of four can have unlimited consultations with experienced doctors.
How do you spread the word?
We have adopted the micro entrepreneur model to connect with people who have lost their jobs due to covid, small shopkeepers who have no work and housewives to sell our products. On an average, one agent makes between Rs 5,000-Rs 10,000 per month.
Any expansion plans?
At present, we are more focused on north India, but will eventually go across India. We plan to have a base city as a centre (like Delhi is for north India) that will serve a cluster of smaller cities around it, so a patient doesn’t have to travel for more than 500km to reach the centre. We also have plans to branch out to other streams.