I am a lifelong Swiggy user, as much as I can recall, so drawing a parallel can be biased, but every Indian would like to have their healthcare experience similar to ordering food from Swiggy. Whenever I think about India’s Healthcare, I think about food ordering from Swiggy. But if any of you can recall before the Swiggy era, Domino’s was the only one that could match a similar or better experience in food (pizza) delivery.
Swiggy’s decision to do heavy work and control the entire experience was an outlier; very few thought it would be scalable. In 2011, Zomato published a blog highlighting why they don’t want to enter in online food delivery. The blog is a good read for anyone thinking of building a large business in India. After three years, Swiggy started online food delivery, controlling the end-to-end experience.
In less than a year, Zomato started online food delivery following an asset-light model - initially, it had no control over the delivery. Zomato announced the acquisition of Runnr to control the end-to-end experience. Of course, both companies benefited from new technology.
For a use-case like Food delivery, where the consumers’ Jobs-to-be-done duration is smaller - Max 30 to 60 minutes (now it is 10 minutes to 60 minutes) - Swiggy has to get its hands dirty and do the heavy lifting. Now imagine heaving lifting for the use-case like Healthcare, where the consumer’s Jobs-to-be-done duration is longer - a day to months, even years, based on OPD and IPD - to bring a similar experience as ordering from Swiggy.
One thing is very clear: the world’s best experience in healthcare delivery will be nothing like Swiggy because both have a completely different business nature, stakeholders, touch points, duration, behaviours, etc.
Right now, I don’t have the answer, but one thing is clear: the Swiggy of Healthcare in India will demand heavy lifting. It will demand an end-to-end control, and such a model will not come from conventional hospital chains.
I liked the YC idea of full-stack AI Companies, where instead of building AI agents for law firms or hospitals, build a law firm and hospital, staff it with AI agents and let the AI agents bring down the cost to make it affordable for the masses - 100 million humans.
I don’t have the answer, but can you think of “Swiggy of Healthcare”?.