Asset Light, People Right

Healthcare startup Pristyn Care’s OYO-like business model and impeccable service have attracted both investors and patients alike. But the model and the promise will be tested as the number of surgeries increase.

- DEBOJYOTI GHOSH

IT’S BEEN A CRUEL AND HARROWING summer for healthcare providers across the country as India grappled with the severe second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. And they have been left as helpless as anyone else by the acute shortage of medical oxygen, ventilators, hospital beds, intensive care units (ICUs), and essential medicines across the country.

It was no different for the founders of healthcare startup Pristyn Care.

“I was getting about 10-15 phone calls every day from friends and family who were either looking for a ventilator or a medical oxygen cylinder for Covid-19 patients,” says 35-year-old Harsimarbir Singh, the only non-medico among the startup’s three founders. “And it was the same for my co-founders and colleagues at the company as well.”

Pristyn Care itself was fielding more than 200 phone calls an hour in April, with callers pleading for either a ventilator, or a hospital bed, or medical oxygen, or antiviral drug Remdesivir. But none of these fell within Pristyn Care’s speciality. The startup, founded in August 2018, focusses on elective surgeries such as cataract, hernia, or hysterectomies, with its asset-light business model meaning it mostly rents the idle infrastructure at hospitals to perform these procedures.

Nevertheless, its founders could not just stand by at this time of crisis. They had to do something.