It was one of those blistering afternoons and I was helping around the house, as the glue that holds our home together, Mom, was unwell. She was feeling better after a course of antibiotics but I noticed that for a 10 minute follow-up with her doctor, she had to travel for 10 times the amount of time and then additionally wait for her turn. She decided she was feeling fine and all the effort for a follow-up wasn’t worth it.
Unfortunately for Mom, a few days later she felt twice as worse and a trip to the doctors was mandated. Turned out it wasn’t just a flu but dengue. Follow-ups seem to be just as important as the first checkup and sometimes can have serious consequences, if avoided.
This got me thinking and I realized that people do not consult a primary care physician unless their condition is deteriorating, even though they have access to quality health care. We tend to wait till we absolutely can’t take it anymore. The consideration of factors like the inconvenience of travelling, the time it takes and sometimes the absolute lack of coordinated time between the patient and the practitioner, turns us into unlicensed doctors and we end up self-diagnosing and self-medicating.
Most of us procrastinate when it comes to medical advice, due to working weekdays and long hours. Just like our workouts, we leave our visits to doctors for the weekend, when more often than not, our preferred list of doctors aren’t even available.
Of late the focus of medical treatment seems to have shifted from preventive medication to that of corrective treatment. Armed with this realization, three of my friends Anurag, Chetan, Shashvat and I, fresh out of college, set out to build a product to solve this issue.
Anurag and I had previously worked with the Ministry Of Defence for over a year and half as Automation Consultants, while Anurag, Chetan and Shashvat had worked for 4 years with the Entrepreneurship Cell of BITS Pilani, our alma mater.
The four of us combined our expertise and created VISIT in the hope of providing the users of our app immediate access to the best medical experts and their reliable and confidential health counsel anywhere, anytime. We decided the overall well-being of our users will be of utmost importance and so VISIT has the best fleet of psychologists, dermatologists, general physicians and dietitians .
At VISIT, we have two key accountabilities — Our chief responsibility is being committed to the users of our app, helping them make important decisions about their and their loved ones’ health. And in order to do this, our second responsibility is tied-in with the first, which is, find a doctor and organizations to collaborate with. We are therefore committed to best-in- class virtual healthcare, the finest clinical quality and industry-leading customer experience.
We’re excited to have redesigned how our users experience healthcare. We have used technology to bring back the essentials of healthcare that have over time gone astray — quality, timeliness and kindness.
Read more about our funding story here
Author is the co- founder of Visit Internet Services Pvt. Ltd.