RE-ORGANIZING HEALTHCARE

Young Turk Aman Bhandula and his team at Farmako is optimizing a healthcare ecosystem that’s plagued with shortage - by reimagining record-keeping. 

MEET THE LEADER 

Aman Bhandula is the Founder and CEO of Farmako, a team that’s building the simplest way to keep your health records. Aman – an IIT Roorkee dropout – has been part of Forbes 30u30 Asia 2022, and part of the y Combinator S20 batch. 

A DEEP DIVE 

We initiate the session with our by-now-familiar request to every Idea Leader: “Please capture your journey in brief for our readers.” Aman obliges…

“We have built a simple UPI-like system for doctors, labs, and patients to keep and share health records with each other.

We have built a structured medical history for more than 5,00,000 patients so far. We launched 30 Minutes Medicine Delivery in Gurgaon last month and are going to launch in 5 more cities in the next 6 months.”

THE BIG IDEA

So what is the one big idea, concept or philosophy that defines Aman and his approach to life? What is his success mantra, so to speak? The young achiever is quick and deliberate with his response, “Find people who you genuinely enjoy working with, pick up a problem big enough and work for a long term on it.” 

THE EVOLUTION

We look to dig deeper, wondering why and how Aman’s idea and philosophy become the driving force of your journey? Was there any person or life-altering experience or turning-point that inspired or accelerated it? Aman turns the clock back and hand holds us through the genesis… 

“When we started working on Farmako, we never thought that we’d do a startup. We knew nothing about it. I experienced the problem myself of not having a structured medical history and decided to work on it. 

I studied at IIT Roorkee, and back at the time when we started, I had so many great people around me, having different skill sets. I told some of my friends about it and two people got excited enough to solve it. Later, we got 3 more people from IIT Roorkee and the same friend circle into our founding team. These are the people I genuinely enjoy working with and would love to work in a long term.”

THE TARGET 

So what is the big goal or problem Aman wants to solve going forward? What is the nature of the ‘ding’ he wants to engineer in Healthcare, to quote from Steve Jobs’ immortal quip?

Aman elaborates: “Indian healthcare infrastructure is broken in so many ways. We have a huge shortage of doctors, hospitals, paramedics, ambulances, pharmacies, etc. When you have a shortage, you will want to make the best use of everything that is available. And we believe that health records can play a major role in a patient’s treatment by optimizing and streamlining the limited resources in our ecosystem. There are so many problems we can solve on top of it - like a shorter treatment process, an efficient online pharmacy, or even the problems on a bigger scale like controlling the COVID situation better or even the cancer treatment.”

A WORD ABOUT VOH

As our brief but inspired tete-a-tete draws to a close, we wish the progressive thinking idea-champion loads of success, and part with a request to share his views on #VoiceofHealthcare. How can, for instance, tribute profiles such as #IdeaLeaders act as ecosystem catalyzers? Aman shares generously…

“I think if not everything, there are certain things you can learn about any sector from the more experienced people. We had to spend 12-18 months just to understand the basics of how the Indian healthcare system works. If Voice of Healthcare offers people a platform to understand and absorb things from more experienced people, it’ll definitely help the Indian startup ecosystem to come up with more innovative solutions!”

*This story is published by VOH team.*