Hyderabad-based Stanplus to strengthen fleet of ambulances

Stanplus has about 3,000 ambulances on its platform including 500 own fleet and remaining belonging to its partners, and also tying up with hospital chains to manage their emergency response system.

Hyderabad: Hyderabad-based private ambulance services provider Stanplus is working on a strategy that includes skilling of people, using technology and standardising ventilators and other medical infrastructure used in the ambulances to match with those used by hospitals for an effective emergency management. It also is increasing the fleet of ambulances, said Gurjit Singh, Chief Operating Officer, Stanplus.

The tech-enabled emergency transporter in April had raised about $22.6 million (about Rs 180 crore). It operates ambulances under the brand Red. It is present in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Raipur, Bhubaneswar and Ahmedabad and has plans to expand to Mumbai, Indore, Kochi, Coimbatore, Lucknow this year.

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Stanplus has about 3,000 ambulances on its platform including 500 own fleet and remaining belonging to its partners. Stanplus is tying up with hospital chains to manage their emergency response system. Fortis Bangalore, Apollo Ahmedabad, Sakra, CARE, KIMS, AIG, Narayana are among its key partner hospitals.

“As an emergency response platform for hospitals, we answer their emergency requests, we have a centralised contact centre. We also answer emergency calls to a lot of hospitals as a white label. The paramedics are trained in triage. We want to build a 911-like system for India and make emergency transport available within 15 minutes. We have a second type of service where the hospitals outsource their entire operations- fleet, paramedics, pilot and other infra. We invest in training. We are a tech-enabled clinical service player,” he said.

It also offers its services to corporates. “We act as a health concierge. Certain corporates want us to be their partners for non-emergencies including diagnostics, onsite, home health and others. We have some partners to provide diagnostics and other services. We also handle emergencies and provide ambulance solutions for the corporate,” said Singh adding that tech parks and warehouse safety rules prescribe having an ambulance within the campus. Any employee or a family of that corporate will contact it for medical needs.

On dealing with traffic conditions, he said the company is building technology that will allow dispatch of an ambulance from the best location possible. “We will have to live with traffic constraints and road issues. When we launch our operations, we also keep a fleet that is not assigned to the hospitals. These will be placed in certain locations,” he said. Stanplus also handles air evacuation and organ transport.

“The medical emergency transport system is fragmented and unorganised. We are working on it to evolve into an organised segment with focus on the golden hour response system. We will skill our people, use technology and create a quality fleet. We are also standardising the type of ventilators and other medical equipment used in the ambulances to match that of the hospitals,” he said. It has served close to 1.4 lakh patients so far since 2016.