Labforth dispatches your medical test reports directly to your smartphones
Bhavishya Wadhawan and Udit Mahajan met through a common acquaintance and through several weekends ended up as friends. A pet topic of conversation would be the lack of digitization in the healthcare sector. As it so happened, Bhavishya went for a medical test and had to send the reports to his doctor who was out of station. Much to his surprise none of the labs in his
area was equipped with the facility to produce reports in a digital format. This prompted Bhavishya to team up with Udit and launch Labforth.Labforth is a laboratory management system that equips pathology and diagnostic labs in India at par with global standards at a fraction of the cost. Moreover, it provides faster turnaround by automating the way orders are received and results are disseminated to clients.
As a product, Labforth simplifies the way laboratories function on a daily basis with minimal manual intervention while sharing their reports across digital channels. “Labforth equips a lab with the capability to preserve patient's medical data for easy tracking of their progress and can be sent out in digital formats. Primarily, it reduces manual intervention required on the part of the patient to share their reports with doctors,” says Bhavishya.
For labs, it eliminates the need to maintain daily back-ups of the patient record as the system is SaaS based, and it can be accessed over email, SMS and any hand-held devices. Besides this, it also offers billing and accounting tool for labs and doctors along with analytics, electronic medical records and digital marketing plug-ins. The startup offers two monthly plans – start (Rs. 999) and grow (Rs.1499).
At present, the TLabs incubated platform is being used by small and medium segment labs with over 25 customers on-board and more than 70 live demos. As per the estimates issued by Cygnus in 2012, India has about 2,00,000 listed labs with the major chunk being in tier 1 cities and more than double this number of unlisted labs in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. The total market size is valued at around $100 million of which the enterprise segment comprises $42 million and SMBs at around $58 million.
The healthcare sector in India is unorganized to a large extent and the biggest challenge Labforth faced was the technology barrier around gathering data and penetrating the market to replace their existing solution. The startup competes with StarLIMS’s software which is used by a large number of laboratories in the enterprise segments. “We aim to expand the reach of Labforth in this segment over the next 18 months,” adds Udit.
Launched in December last year, Labforth plans to penetrate enterprise and SMBs segment in India by the end of 2014. “Over the next two-three years we plan to become the biggest health technology company in south Asia extending our reach to all segments in healthcare,” states Bhavishya.
