Medical facilities in Indonesia are not evenly distributed. HaloDoc wants to help tackle this challenge

Get insights from Jon Richards and more at Echelon Asia Summit 2019. Happening on May 23-24 at the Singapore Expo. Tickets are now available at US$10 each!

Healthtech is one of the most exciting sectors in Southeast Asian tech industry today. Hailing from Indonesia, HaloDoc is one of the companies in the region that is working to ensure better access to healthcare for all patients.

The Jakarta-based company had made several exciting milestones, having just announced a US$65 million funding round led by UOB Venture in March.

In addition to the funding round, the company had also seen a 25 times growth in patients helped to get treatment in 2018.

It has also secured over six million monthly active users using the HaloDoc platform to talk to doctors, search for healthcare information, book appointments, and purchase medications.

In an interview with e27, HaloDoc CFO Jon Richards explains that as a telemedicine platform, helping more people in Indonesia getting greater access to healthcare is one of the company’s greatest milestones.

Also Read: Go-Jek integrates Go-Med into HaloDoc app as the two companies strengthen collaboration

“Access to healthcare in Indonesia is, and has always been a challenge. When you live in a big city, the challenge is congestion: The problem of [how to] get there. [Big cities are] congested, hard to get around. If you live outside of the big cities there are just not enough doctors – that in itself is a different set of challenges. But now with HaloDoc, distance is less of a factor,” he says.

“We’re a tech company, we write codes, that’s what we are investing in, and that’s what we apply to healthcare sector,” he adds.

Richards also stressed that the problem in Indonesia’s healthcare sector is not that there are no good doctors. In fact, many healthcare facilities in the country are able to lure in patients from neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and Singapore.

The problem that Indonesia is facing is that the facilities are not evenly distributed.

Before the existence of telemedicine services, the ratio between general practitioners and specialists in islands outside of Java are 90:10. But telemedicine is able to improve the ratio to 60:40, enabling greater access to specialised medical care in the islands.

“We need to use our existing doctors more efficiently, and we can do that through technology,” Richards says.

Also Read: HaloDoc completes US$13M Series A to bolster Indonesia’s healthcare sector

At the moment, 20 per cent of HaloDoc users are based in Jakarta, 50 per cent in Java, and the rest in islands outside of Java.

What are the strategy that the company used to acquire these users? Apart from implementing traditional marketing practices, there is also an emphasis on patients and patients’ journey.

“What telemedicine represents is a new way for doctors to engage with patients, and vice versa. It requires some education, some awareness. People have to learn that this is a thing that they can do now, and that it is reliable,” Richards says.

The history of HaloDoc itself began when founder Jonathan Sudharta was working as a medical representative of a pharmaceutical company.

Through his work, Sudharta was able to know a great number of doctors, that people began to ask him to forward their medical questions to the doctors that he knew.

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Get insights from Jon Richards and more at Echelon Asia Summit 2019. Happening on May 23-24 at the Singapore Expo. Tickets are now available at US$10 each!

Images Credit: HaloDoc

The post How HaloDoc aims to open greater access to healthcare for all Indonesians appeared first on e27.