Bengaluru based healthcare tech startup Eka Care has raised $15 Mn in its latest series A round, led by Hummingbird Ventures. The round also saw significant participation from 3one4Capital, Mirae Assets, Verlinvest, Aditya Birla Ventures, Binny Bansal, Rohit MA among others.
The company plans to utilise the proceeds from this round for development, hiring, educating consumers on the benefits of maintaining a health profile and helping doctors move to digital practice.
Founded in December 2020 by Vikalp Sahni and Deepak Tuli, Eka care provides a digital healthcare records safekeeping platform. Since medical records range from fairly simple to fairly affair depending on patient conditions, accessing them physically is an inconvenient process for doctors, especially in hospitals which have a higher patient footfall. Also, many patients who visit medical facilities outside of their hometown’s tend to misplace or forget documents like prescriptions, test reports, imaging scans etc.
Co-founder and CEO Vikalp Sahni said, “I don’t see a future where you will continue to keep a large part of your health data non-digital. When you go to a doctor, and you have a medical record file, the doctor has to go through every page of that file, which is impossible for anyone to read through and remember,” said Tuli. “But if it’s a graph, it is easy to remember and see… That’s the fundamental difference for a doctor.”
Eka Care also caters to the other side of the table, by allowing doctors to take their practice online, including online one-to-one patient sessions, clinic management, digital prescriptions etc.
The app has partnered with the central government’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), allowing users to create and manage Ayushman Bharat Health accounts (ABHA). Eka Care has also integrated with Unified Health interface (UHI) and CoWIN App. These integrations help streamline patient ID procedures for the app.
“The essence of UHI and ABDM is that public health record apps will be the health locker for patients,” Sahni said. “It is absolutely what we want for the users. So, it was a natural integration for us.”
According to Eka Care’s numbers, they are the country’s largest medical record database, housing 30 million health records and 1.6 million ABHAs. The app is used by more than 5,000 doctors.
