Transform Indian healthcare with us
Hey everyone! My name is Chaitu Aluru, I’m the CTO and Co-Founder of DocTalk.
My two co-founders and I started working on DocTalk in the summer of 2016 as part of Y Combinator’s Fellowship program. More recently, we were a part of Y Combinator’s W17 batch. If you’ve never heard of YC before, here are some YC stats from the year 2015.
Throughout the process, we have built DocTalk into a company used by over 5000 people and are working towards reaching a million more within the next year.
For the last month, I have spoken with many talented engineers. After getting to know these people at a personal level, I steer the conversation towards DocTalk.
I typically begin the discussion by communicating our vision for the company,
We want to change how healthcare works in India.
This leads to them asking me a multitude of interesting questions. The latest versions of my answers to these are laid out below:
What do you do?
We help patients stay connected to their doctors, improving both groups’ well-being in the process.
Imagine the last doctor you met used DocTalk.
The moment you finish your in-person consultation, you are asked to connect to them on our platform.
After signing up, you’re able to send messages to your doctor, store medical files, get detailed prescriptions, track your vitals, save your medications, read content tailored for you, and much more.
All things related to your health can now be stored on your phone systematically and shared between you and your doctor with ease.
How do you make doctors’ lives easier?
We are bringing millions of messages normally sent over WhatsApp from patients to their doctors to DocTalk.
We then surround this with features that make communication through the app 10x more efficient. To illustrate this, the screen from our application below shows how easy it is for doctors to have quick access to their patients’ medical details:
Additionally, we ensure each doctor gets paid for their time and in the process, put the doctor’s practice directly on their phone. Whether they are in a car, at home, or on vacation, they always have access to their patients’ details.
Doctors love us, and we love them back ❤
How is this going to change healthcare in India?
Everything mentioned above, our team is doing in a country where healthcare is offline (far from being accessible on your mobile device). Worse still, most people don’t think of their health until they fall sick.
We’re already improving the medical outcomes of our users and hope to continue to do so for years to come.
What have you built so far?
We have built applications for iOS and Android, two on each platform — one for doctors and the other for patients (like Uber, which has one for drivers and one for riders). We also have a web application for doctors that acts as an extension of the application.
All this was built by a team of 3 engineers over a span of 8 months.
We follow many engineering blogs and thought leaders, constantly trying to improve our work and stack.
Some frameworks we use include react-native, reactive extensions (both rxswift and rxjava), lambda and cloud functions.
How do you make money?
Patients pay on a monthly basis to communicate with their doctor over DocTalk, and we keep a part of their payment. The doctor takes the rest.
Why do doctors use your app?
- To save time while making more money!
- To improve their patients’ health.
- To track their own practice, effortlessly.
7 out of every 10 doctors we talk to want to use DocTalk.
Why do patients use your app?
- To stay connected with their doctor.
- To improve their personal health.
5 out of every 10 patients that walk into our doctors’ clinics download DocTalk.
How big can this get?
Straight from our pitch at Y Combinator’s Demo Day this year —
Have you raised any money?
Yes, we raised a seed round after YC.
We’re currently backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Vy Capital, Liquid2Ventures, Venture Highway, AltaIR Capital and some angel investors.
What is the founding team like?
DocTalk has three founders — Akshat, Vamsee and me — all from India.
Akshat is a Wharton graduate with an extensive background in investment banking. He is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met. I wish I met him earlier! When not working on DocTalk, he’s thinking about DocTalk. The only thing I have seen him do besides DocTalk is spend time with his amazing little dog.
Vamsee, I have had the pleasure of knowing since middle school. He studied Computer Science at IIIT, Hyderabad, and is a relentless worker as well as one of my closest friends. When not working on DocTalk, he claims to be a Golden State Warriors fan, but he wouldn’t wake up to watch a single game of last year’s finals. He now says that he will wake up for this year’s games (if they make it to the finals).
As for me, I studied Computer Science at Brown University. I’ve been exposed to healthcare (my dad is a doctor) and tech from a young age and have always wanted to generate meaningful change at the intersection of those two sectors. DocTalk is providing me with the perfect platform for this. When not working on the company, you’ll find me listening to audio books, keeping up with technology, and playing basketball.
What are you looking for in your next team member?
- Immense passion for solving problems.
- Desire to make a huge difference in healthcare.
- Love for building things from scratch.
- Penchant for working with a very technical team.
What type of work can I expect?
- Coding, lots and lots of it.
- Being a decision-maker.
- Designing and architecting much of our stack as we move forward.
- Constant thinking about product and growth.
There will be few days, if any, on which you feel like you were not challenged.
If these answers raised a lot more questions in your mind, I’d love to talk to you! You can reach me at krishna@getdoctalk.com 🙂
