With over a million app users, Healthkart Plus gears to tap underserved market around drugs and wellness info

Internet gives us access to almost anything. Right from shopping, bill payments, phone recharge to ordering food, everything is only a matter of few taps on the mobile, tablet or laptop. There are tons of options available if you want to look for a good place to eat, party and hang out, but hardly any dedicated information source to help you understand your medications.

To address this vaccuum, health and wellness e-tailer Healthkart launched HealthKartPlus which enables you to know more about your medicine, and find substitutes from other brands as well as their generic equivalents which are cost effective. “It is an initiative taken with a vision to empower Indian consumers with knowledge related to health, medicines and enable them to play a more active role in ensuring their treatment is of highest quality,” says Prashant Tandon, Co-founder of Healthkart.

The service is available on the web, including apps across Android, iOS, and Windows operating systems. With its ‘Pocket Chemist’ feature the platform equips users to discover cost effective generic drugs that can substitute prescription medicine. “The app already has million plus downloads across the three platforms i.e. Android, iOS and Windows, and continues to grow rapidly,” adds Prashant.

Healthkart Plus offers features like search for drugs, get full information on the searched drug and over-the-counter medication like the dosages, common usage and warnings. Besides these, it gives cost comparison tool for generic and prescribed drugs.

As of now, the platform gets over 10 million hits on the web and app platforms, which clearly signifies the fact that a lot of people are looking for this information. “We have not done much marketing, and I am sure as and when people come to know of this, they will love to have this power of information,” says Prashant.

On Google Play Store, the company’s app has been ranked the top medical app with close to 850K downloads while iOS version amassed 450K downloads.

According to Prashant, the potential market is almost every adult in India and around the world. “We have helpful information for anyone who is prescribed medication,” he adds.

With platforms like Healthkart Plus, Indians can save Rs. 24,000 crore annually by using generic medicines; medical costs can come down by 70% when using generic equivalents. The total healthcare market of India is estimated to be of Rs 79, 945 crore.

“Healthkart Plus is a fully fledged internal business line and we believe it will have very interesting monetization potential at scale, given the quality of our customers and the usage patterns,” points out Prashant. At present, the company isn’t focused on monetization – just building out a fantastic product that solves some real pain points and is of value to a lot of consumers.

“Once we hit a critical scale, we will explore monetization options through web/ in-app advertising, providing more transaction services (e.g. m-pharmacy), digital products for health consumers and creating insights using the data we generate,” says Prashant.