Hyderabad: Prescrip, a platform that allows doctors to schedule appointments to patients, has plans to tap about 4,000 doctors in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh from the current 700, said its founder and chief executive officer Shekar Rawtani.
Founded in 2014, the company was initially into digitalisation of the prescriptions. It later added scheduling, collection of consultation fee and video consultations also using Whatsapp. It also allows the doctors to send reminders to the patients about the medicines they should have at the scheduled times, he said.
The company gets its revenues in pay-per-use as well as subscription models. While the doctors need to install the app at their end, the patients need not install the same on their mobiles. For video consultations, the doctors send in a link for the patients to fill in the mandatory details and also the consent from. The consultation is secure as it happens on the Whatsapp platform, he said.
“Making a prescription is easy. The platform learns from the doctor’s practice and over a period of time, creates a data bank to throw up suggestions. For instance, in case of Covid, the treatment is standardised as per age. The doctors can make the prescription for Covid in a few clicks,” he explained.
“We have seen more that 300 per cent increase in video consultations in April compared to March. On an average, about 2,400 video consultations are happening everyday on our platform and more than 80 per cent of them are Covid-related. Follow-ups for hypertension and diabetes are the other cases where video consultation is being used,” said Rawtani adding that video consultation is expected to peak further in days to come as the Covid cases are on the rise.
Several doctors are working round the clock to deal with emergencies, mostly related to Covid and also for second opinions, he said, telling the magnitude of workload the medical fraternity is faced due to Covid. Prescrip allows the doctors to send the payment links to patients for the video consultation. The doctors can also schedule appointments for physical visits, wherever allowed and possible, he said.
“We do not have any patient treatment details. The video consultation is encrypted as it happens on the Whatsapp platform,” he said.
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