Roshan Shah, Founder, Kosansh Health Solutions

Healthcare for everyone! 

Its not always pleasant running to a hospital everytime you catch cold or have a headache. That is why there are Medical Tourism Social Networks. Kosansh Health Solutions is one of them. Kosansh is the brainchild of Roshan Shah, a graduate from Canada who was always intrested in starting something of his own.

Kosansh is a Social Network that addresses the needs of Medical Tourism Industry. It connects patients with local and remote facilitators, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, pharma companies, medical device companies, wellness companies and other healthcare product companies.

An uninsured person looking for artificial limb will be able to search through Kosansh store for various options, order a limb from say china get it shipped to mexico get surgery done in mexico upload his medical reports in patient vault and get second opinion from his local physician or remote doctor say in India. He can also go back to the recording to listen to the conversation he has had with the doctor. His US doctor can then prescribe and order low cost drugs from Indian pharma companies via Kosansh store which costs 1/20^th of what it costs in US and the drug company directly supplies the medicine to the patient in US via its network andwarehouse.

Kosansh Health Solutions is also currently working on Donorshouse www.donorshouse.com ,a Global Blood and Organ Donation repository.

Unlike other ventures Kosansh has the first mover advantage. They are doing bootcamp city by city and then appointing a local facilitator who then works with local hospitals to work up custom treatment and tourism packages and puts them in system which are then pushed to all other facilitators who will use this material to market to the international patients.

Kosansh was established in 2009 and so far it has two employees and one branch. It have been just carved out into a new company, after initiating the product was tested in market during Beta. It has only promoters currently in the company. "We are adding contractors for now for Field Marketing as well as Social Media Marketing. Its global when it comes to consumers and all healthcare providers otherwise when it comes to being paying members in portal, this also extends to tour operators, translators, etc." says Roshan.

Roshan wishes to implement monthly membership subscription options and also have Kosansh store go live.

It has not been an easy journey for Roshan. They were toying with this idea since 2006. The product development failed three times but everytime they started it again with a different approach. In 2008, their labs finally delivered the architecture that aligned with promoter's vision.

"I certainly would like to give special credits to efforts of Anjan Doshi, Barinder Singh, Kuldip Gohil, Tejendra Shandilya in sticking with me and doing things over and over again till we got it right." recalls Roshan. Just the idea of saving the lives of millions drove him to stay clutched.

He came across many hurdles. Management Bandwidth has been the biggest challenge for Roshan so far. He says "Everyone gets awed by size, benefits of Infosys, Wipro but no one believes in google mentality. It is changing now though with deals in pipeline and other VC's and angel investors, hospitals, doctors showing interest in our solution." However according to him giving away equity to employees too soon is one of his biggest mistake.

Besides these hiccups there are achievements too. Medical Tourism Bootcamp in Ahmedabad has been very successful and they have got more business requests from hospitals, doctors, clinics then they can handle. They also have got requests from Baroda and Jaipur to do such bootcamps there.

According to Roshan access to government resources i.e land, capital, research funding, grants are the key challenges faced by Indian Entrepreneurs. He wishes to see the promotion of entrepreneurship at grass-root level so that a graduate first thinks of building the next facebook or hybrid car rather than getting into a nine to five job.

He advices the first generation entrepreneurs and says "Write a business plan and stay focused. Get mentors and do reach them out. Even fifteen minutes spent with successful entrepreneurs will be worth more than fifteen months in classroom."

YourStory wishes Roshan Shah and his dream company all the success and hopes to see them expand their wings day by day.