Panasonic will start locally developed, healthcare support business in India. It is a service of recommending hospitals / clinics through a smartphone app to the low- and middle-income population who are not accustomed to going to hospital. The company will first launch the service in India, with an intention to eventually expand it to emerging markets in the Middle East and Africa. It is an attempt to develop an innovation model – of creating new business locally that caters to specific problems and needs of emerging countries and expanding it to other markets in the world.
Panasonic will collaborate with more than 10 hospitals in the northern region of India by the end of this fiscal year. Counselors with a medical license in the call center and dedicated staff sent by the company to these hospitals will provide consultation to patients and recommend optimal hospitals / clinics according to the symptoms. Looking ahead, Panasonic intends to use the data collected from the patients and hospitals to create new services, tapping into the growing healthcare-related demand in the country.
The service was developed at India Innovation Centre, a facility for new business creation jointly run with India’s largest IT service provider Tata Consultancy Services. The center was launched in 2017 with a view to creating business that is more closely focused on local needs, with speed.
Traditionally, many of the products and services have followed the path of being developed in Japan and then brought overseas. Panasonic’s new service in India, however, primarily targets low- and middle-income earners living in the outskirts of cities. These are the people who are found to not commonly seek medical care at hospitals while many of them own low-end smartphones. It is a service that could probably have been conceived only there, a service that has little use in Japan, where people have access to medical facilities.
Panasonic will start the service in Uttar Pradesh and other regions in the northern part of India by this summer, with a plan to spread it throughout the country early. The eventual target is projected to be roughly 900 million people, out of the country’s entire population of about 13 million. The company sees potential opportunities in the Middle East and Africa, where they have similar business customs and social problems.
Patients coming to hospitals via the app will get 10 to 20% discounts on their hospital bills. To promote the app use, Panasonic will also partner with local small-loan banks that have many of the local residents as their customers. Panasonic will receive 10% of the treatment fees from the hospitals as commissions. The service fits the hospital’s motivation to attract patients from outside the cities, too.
In India, health insurance and family registration systems still remain underdeveloped. Panasonic aims to use the collected patient data, such as their history of hospital visits, to create yet new business in the future, including drug recommendations based on symptoms and collaboration with public offices. It also seeks to develop channels into hospitals, with an eye to selling information systems, too.
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