How startups are creating Uber-like ambulance experience during pandemic

With the pandemic exposing the vulnerabilities of the medical response systems, startups are creating an Uber- or Ola-like ambulance experience for people at large. These companies have seen 2-3x growth in the past one year as timely medical response becomes key in saving lives during the pandemic. 

Gurugram-based Medulance has been catering to emergency services via such a service, mapping it to the closest hospital. Founded by Pranav Bajaj and Ravjot Arora in 2017, the startup provides a B2C and B2B ambulance service with clients such as Zomato, HCL and GMR on board. 

“By using our integrated proprietary emergency management technology, we have been able to install GPS devices in a majority of our fleet today, which is about 5,000 ambulances across 22 cities,” said Bajaj. It has so far assisted over 70,000 Covid-19 suspects/ patients to hospitals in time.

There is a helpline number for the front-end user and at the backend there is a dispatch software that allows the executives to get the patient information including the vitals, which is helpful to decide which type of ambulance is necessary and quickly pinpoint the five closest ambulances to the location to allocate the same.

A National Institute of Emergency Medicine (NIEM) revealed that more than 20 per cent of patients requiring immediate medical care died solemnly due to traffic delays

“We've been able to maintain a response time of about 25 minutes in tier-1 cities and about 35-40 minutes in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, right, which we are already working on improving. Ultimately we want to be able to dispatch an ambulance within three to four minutes of a request,” said Bajaj, who is looking at closing an up to $2 million fundraise at the company in the coming months. 

While Medulance runs as an ambulance aggregator platform, another player StanPlus which is on a mission to disrupt the medical response system is creating a brand of Red ambulances with an average arrival time of 20 minutes. “We believe that there are not enough good quality ambulances in the market so we launched our own brand called Red Ambulances three months ago,” said Prabhdeep Singh, Founder and CEO, StanPlus. 

The startup already has 130 ambulances in its fleet and will be adding a 100 more over the next 5 months via Grip Invest, which offers investment opportunities in physical assets that are leased to corporates. 

“Leveraging the power of crowdfunding in order to put more life-saving ambulances on our roads is a noble and innovative idea. We are honoured to make this a reality for a company as dedicated to public welfare as StanPlus. Through our collaboration, we will be unlocking a chance to do good while earning substantial returns to our investors,” said Nikhil Aggarwal, Founder & CEO, Grip Invest.

StanPlus is aiming to build a strong network of 3,000 ambulances across 100 cities over the next 3-4 years. “Like Uber and Ola, we are trying to formalise the fragmented medical response market and bring in transparency via our apps and standardised pricing,” said Singh, whose company is also an aggregator of air ambulances.