Big Tech and pharmaceutical companies accelerate the implementation of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry. Only last month, AWS and General Catalyst announced their partnership to accelerate The development and provision of AI tools in the healthcare system. GE Healthcare has teamed up with AWS to build Generative AI for medical use in 2024.
Now a startup in the healthcare system based in Thailand, HDhas built up a marketplace, HDMall to digitize the fragmented medical industry in Southeast Asia. The startup helps users to find health service providers such as hospitals and clinics. It also helps people find certain operations and health examinations, lower services at lower costs and offers users in installments.
The startup has received 7.8 million US dollars of equity financing to improve its marketplace and further invest in its AI technology. The latest financing marks the first investment of the US Pharma Giant Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) in a Healthtech startup in the Asian -Pacific area. (MSD is the brand with which Merck is operated outside the USA and Canada, and it Introduced a accelerator pedal called idea studios Last June.) Other participants in the financing of HD were also involved in the latest financing.
“MSD, which produces the HPV vaccines, has (us), because we have already sold many HPV vaccines online that have been managed in the hospitals and clinics with which we were working,” said co-founder and CEO from HD Sheji Ho in an exclusive interview with Techcrunch. “And if you look at the numbers, we (offer) offer the largest number for vaccines online in the markets.”
The five-year marketplace of the startup has more than 2,500 hospitals and clinics and a handful of pharmaceutical partners and 400,000 paying customers across Thailand and Indonesia, whereby an annual gross transaction volume is generated. The aim is to achieve 5,000 health service providers and 600,000 patients in 2025.
The latest financing, which receives the total financing of HD to 18 million US dollars, is less than a year After it brought in a round of 5.6 million US dollars.
At the beginning of 2024, HD started building a KI chatbot, Jib AI, which was trained on anonymized health product data, transaction data and chat commerce data with extended major language models. After the implementation of generative AI technology, almost 60% of the customer interactions of AI agents who provide “high-quality, immediate 24-member response to customers” are managed, said Ho.
Jib Ai helps health professions such as nurses, doctors and surgeons to provide high-quality patient care by bypassing most of the first trippy and care navigation tasks.
Over the next 12 months, the company is aiming to improve its AI agent functions by adding order and reimbursement processing, supported checkouts, planning, checking the electronic health records and annoying information with the assistant of JIB AI and through AI-powered asynchronous virtual care With experienced doctors.
The startup also says that it expands its network of external partners in the next two years and focuses on insurance and pharmaceutical companies as well as employers and educational institutions.
“While US health companies such as transcarent and accurade began directly with the B2B Care Navigation, we see a unique opportunity in Southeast Asia to adopt A “B2C2B strategy”, as defined by Andreessen Horowitz“, Ho told Techcrunch. “This approach uses our existing B2C success to switch to B2B and to effectively pursue company monealization from the start.”
Health care in Southeast Asia
Most of the startups in Southeast Asia, including Singapurs doctor everywhereHalodoc and alodicers in Indonesia, primarily focus on telemedicine and virtual health services. But Ho says that the approach is not sustainable in Southeast Asia. “Post-Pandemic as a business model in SEA has encountered considerable challenges and quickly loses both consumers and investors.”
The company is now positioning itself as a mixture Amazon One Medical In the United States, Chinese outpatient health platforms JD Health And Alibaba Healthand the Indian inpatient health platform Pristyn care.
The healthcare industry is very different in aspiring Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. Without a house doctor system like in western countries, patients often go directly to hospitals or clinics. This makes it difficult for the patient to find the right health services, know where to go and understand how they can handle the costs, Ho told Techcrunch.
Due to 40% of health costs paid by individuals and are a low level of private health insurance coverage, people react more pressure to prices and feel more pressure when making decisions. This leads to a growing demand for platforms that offer clarity, transparency and simple comparison between different providers.
The HD platform looks more like “Amazon of Healthcare”. Instead of listing individual general practitioners or offering scheduling for doctors, it enables health service providers to sell productive services. “Our offers range from health investigations to cancer provision and IVF procedures to root canal treatments, HPV vaccinations and operations such as thyroid and hemorrhoid operations. This approach corresponds to the way most people in the region begin their health trips – by searching for certain services and not for individual doctors, ”said Ho.
HD offers its services in Thailand and Indonesia and plans to enter Vietnam and Myanmar because of their similar health systems in Vietnam and Myanmar.
“In a way, your health model is quite similar to the Chinese mainland. So it is a high cash payment, around 40%. There is no house doctor system, so people go directly to hospitals or clinics. After that, reporting on the social security of the government comes into play, ”Ho told Techcrunch. “But these budgets are getting smaller. This means that the pressure to cover health care in the direction of the private sector is more relocated, be it through cash or private insurance. For this reason, insurance offers us a great opportunity. “
In addition, there is an increasing trend towards self -management in terms of user behavior in these markets. You get used to the use of tools like Google Search or Chatgpt more to search for the healthcare system. This corresponds well to what HD offers because, according to HO, they meet their own healthcare system.
