Medikabazaar

Vivek Tiwari (CEO- Medikabazaar)

Medikabazaar is a tech-enabled pioneering company aimed at addressing the quandaries and irregularities of medical supplies procurement of hospitals and healthcare centers. It is a complete ecosystem of medical supplies addressing the major challenges of product awareness and availability, healthcare accessibility and affordability. Medikabazaar is empowering medical institutions to deal with complex problems of procurement & regular purchases by helping them adopt a digital procurement process which is streamlined and transparent.

In order to sustain higher growth and operational excellence, medical establishments need to achieve higher efficiency for positive patient outcomes. In order to achieve a better healthcare delivery model; optimizing the cost and efficiency of medical procurement is of paramount importance. 

Medical supplies include the complete range of products from medical gloves, cotton to high end medical devices & equipment etc. They are changing the landscape of ‘procurement & supplies’ in the healthcare industry by establishing the largest medical supplies platform in India. 

Their journey started in April 2015 by the founder and CEO, Vivek Tiwari (IIM Calcutta alumnus) has been progressing steadily since then.

 
The Eureka Moment

The business model was conceived out of the founder’s past experience in managing a chain of multi-location tertiary care clinics in tier 2, 3 cities and remote locations in India. It was during this project that Vivek realized that healthcare centres in these areas didn’t get a steady supply of quality medical supplies due to the non-availability of reliable vendors and a fragmented supply chain. 

This resulted in hospitals and medical institutions falling prey to the unorganized and inefficient procurement system. Vivek understood that an inefficient and inadequate procurement system in hospitals adversely affects patients by making healthcare inaccessible and unaffordable. Therefore, he envisioned an innovative medical supplies platform coupled with last-mile delivery services which will connect with medical establishments in these far-flung areas, deliver their required supplies and enable them to administer quality patient care. #Healthcare #HealthcarePR #HealthcareEntrepreneur #HealthcareIndustry

The USP

Since their inception, more than thousands of hospitals, doctors, and healthcare establishments have registered on their website and they are their go-to guys for buying medical supplies. The website has an unconventional user-interface which helps doctor keep track of their past purchases, recommendations, and pricing of competitive products.
Once bootstrapped, Medikabazaar is now a funded company. They have managed to disrupt the market and levelled the playing field by launching a large-scale digital platform to buy medical equipment. Android and iOS apps have made it possible for everyone to buy medical supplies at their fingertips. They have bridged the gap between healthcare providers and medical suppliers and increased access to quality products.
Medikabazaar is the largest aggregators of medical equipment in India at the moment. A typical 100-bed hospital today works with 800-900 vendors, but when they approach Medikabazaar, they come to a consolidated single-point platform. Of every ?100 that hospitals spend, ?35-40 are spent on medical supplies, which is the second-largest expenditure after staff salaries, in their Total Cost of Operations (TCO). Medikabazaar makes sure they save around 30% per cent on procurement cost. Majority of their clients are online customers with approximately 15,000 B2B transactions every month.

Challenges and roadblocks

The challenges were manifold since it is primarily a B2B concept. The initial challenge was that there were no established B2B medical supplies platform in India as most of the B2B solution enterprises are just for information and classified or advertisement purpose. The company had to organize a massive campaign in medical institutions through direct contacts and digital platforms to create awareness on this concept. Fortunately, the concept was well accepted due to the acceptance of problems from users in the identified area.

A digital procurement platform for medical supplies eliminating the geographical restrictions was non-existent and it was a humungous task to engage multiple vendors and ask for price quotes, negotiation for purchases etc and there always existed a bigger challenge in getting the right price from a reliable vendor and there was no vendor who was covering an array of medical supplies. 

The road ahead

Medikabazaar aims to facilitate last mile delivery options to arranging SME loans (with the help of credit rating agencies and FI’s) options for the smaller institutions linked with their portal to facilitate B2B trading. It primarily works on PIN CODE based delivery system to achieve last mile distribution challenges. This will be a unique and first-hand experience for medical institutions to avail such facilities of last mile loan / finance etc. at the click of a button. It also offers a unique facility of dealing in refurbished and pre-owned medical equipment called MedikaRecycle.
Currently working on a hybrid marketplace model to segregate buyer types, Medikabazaar intends to have a B2B2C model in place in future to empower consumers take benefit of medical purchases. 

The healthcare market size is approximately USD 110 Bn (2017) with an estimated market size of USD 372 Bn by 2022. The share of medical supplies is enormous and poised to grow much faster in the segment with the usage and adoption of new medical technology. Presently the share of medical supplies including medical equipment is INR 147,000 Crs appx (taking 2015 data), roughly 31% of the healthcare market size . 
Medikabazaar has plans to consolidate its supply chain and logistics capabilities and expand its network to 50,000 hospitals and clinics by the end of 2019. They also plan to increase the number of fulfillment centers (currently 14) for greater PAN India penetration.

Awards and Accolades 

2019:
Awarded “Best Last Mile Delivery” at the Global Logistics Excellence Awards 2019
Nominated as one of the “50 Start-ups to Look Out for in 2019!” by Entrepreneur India
            magazine
 
2018: 
• National Icon Awards 2018 
• Selected as one of the Top 50 Brands in the 8th Annual Pitch Top 50 Brands 2018
• Selected as one of the finalists for 2018 Innovation Awards at the 20th Edition of Medicall Expo, Chennai
• Awarded “Best Med Tech E-Tailing Solutions” at the Medical Technology Excellence Awards, 2018 by ASSOCHAM 

2017: 
• Excellence in E-Healthcare Initiative at The Healthcare – Pharma& Medical Devices Summit And Excellence Awards 2017
• Healthcare IT Company of the Year at 7th MT India Healthcare Awards 2017

2016: 
• Business Pitch Finalist at Start-Up World Expo 2016
• Selected as one of the 8 Healthtech Start-Ups at IBM SmartCamp 2016

*This story is published by VOH Team*

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