Ambulance in 8 minutes: This start-up is doing to healthcare what Blinkit, Zepto did with grocery

According to a report published by All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), 98.5 per cent of ambulances in India exist to carry dead bodies, 90 per cent of ambulances are without any equipment/oxygen, 95 per cent of ambulances have untrained personnel, most of the doctors having no formal training in emergency medical services (EMS), misuse of government ambulances and 30 per cent mortality is due to delay in emergency care.

What's more is that while getting groceries in 10 minutes is common now, the same is not true for an ambulance service. Hyderabad-based RED.Health (formerly known as StanPlus) wants to change this with its unique solutions. 

The company was started in 2016 by Prabhdeep Singh. The start-up has now rebranded itself to RED.Health. RED stands for Rapid Emergency Dispatch. It is also segmenting itself into four verticals including RED Ambulances, RED Assist, RED Priority Clinics, and RED Academy. All these are being built and integrated by deploying technology to become a full-stack emergency response platform. 

In an interview with Business Today, Singh said his aim is to “fit an emergency product wherever a human is spending time.” 

RED.Health has raised $22.6 million so far from investors like HealthQuad, Kalaari Capital and HealthX Capital Singapore amongst others. Currently, it has a fleet of more than 5,000 ambulances, and 10 air ambulances. Moreover, it has partnered with over 300 hospitals and 1,200 medical care experts to assist patients across the country.

“RED Assist is a platform which is used to handle emergencies in situations like a passenger falling ill while in a cab or some emergencies that can happen mid-air in flights,” Singh explains. RED Assist primarily concerns itself with connecting a patient to a doctor in real-time.

However, the start-ups' most important tool that is giving a major push to the healthcare industry is the eight-minute ambulance service at the users’ doorstep. The healthtech firm claims that the ambulance is dispatched in less than a minute and then the patient is taken to the nearest RED Priority Clinic. 

To support these  three products, the start-up has also come up with the RED Academy which focuses on training and development of the workforce. “We also have created our own training modules so we are launching our Red Academy.”

On a mission to disrupt healthtech

According to research platform, India Brand Equity Foundation, the Indian healthtech industry is slated to touch $132.8 billion by the end of 2023.

While the start-up’s presence is limited to a couple of cities only including Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Kanpur, Kochi, and a few more, RED.Health’s plan is to expand to over 200 cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai in the next quarter.

Singh says that the venture capitalist community has also started taking the healthtech space more seriously so he is optimistic about the coming times. However, he is aware that what he has set out to accomplish will not happen in a day, a month or a year. In fact, by his own admission, even a decade seems less.

But he has made up his mind. “I have made a 30-year-commitment. I have taken this for my parents. If I can solve this for my parents, I can solve it for your parents and others’ as well,” he asserts.