An Exclusive Interview with Aditya Sharma, CEO of Affordplan

Healthcare and technology are now amalgamated with finance in Affordplan. It's healthcare savings card, medical loans and insurance services are widely popular. It has partnered with hundreds of hospitals across 15 cities, having touched more than 5,00,000 patient lives through its products.

This one-of-a-kind organization is headed by Aditya Sharma and Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with him.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Launched in 2015, Affordplan is a first-of-its-kind fintech platform, which is at the intersection of finance, healthcare, and technology. We've partnered with hundreds of hospitals across 15 cities, having touched more than 5,00,000 patient lives through our products. Swasth – our current innovation is a healthcare savings card launched in collaboration with YES BANK, that can be used across OPD, IPD, lab, and pharmacy services. Affordplan Swasth offers a full stack of financial services for healthcare including an OPD wallet, IPD savings, medical loans, and insurance.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

The percentage of people fortunate to have an insurance cover of some kind are few in India. Healthcare needs in the country are met through a mixture of savings, borrowings, family contributions, or liquidation of personal assets. In seeking quality medical intervention, most families face liquidity challenges causing events that can derail their finances.

Affordplan is designed to help Indian consumers better manage healthcare expenses. The company partners with hospitals across India to reduce the cost of OPD as well as IPD procedures, and offer consumers options to help them get the care they need without making them financially vulnerable. All this is done through a bank-backed card integrated with tech making the entire experience easy to use for a consumer.

We started out with a goal-based savings platform that helped patients break their treatment costs in smaller instalments allowing them to pay with ease without deferring treatment or choosing over other household expenses. That product was well received and we successfully ran the product with 500+ hospitals across India. In 2020, we launched Swasth, India's first healthcare savings card with YES BANK. We've had quite the journey since, battling challenges thrown by the pandemic and its various waves but are seeing great acceptance with 100+ partnerships in 15 cities.

Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

Affordplan Swasth was launched in the middle of the pandemic, with hospitals turning into covid centres. As a product meant for a healthcare audience, we were struggling to find an audience with hospital owners and stakeholders. Hospitals had reduced footfalls with patients choosing to defer treatment for when the COVID wave recedes.

The year has brought with it great learning with discovering strengths about the product as well as the organization.

What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from its competitors?

Healthcare finance has been limited to medical loans and medical insurance for the longest time. There is a glaring gap as far as out-of-pocket expenses are concerned and there aren't many players that are addressing this. Healthcare finance or payments remains largely untouched owing to a disorganised market and complexities of the value chain both on the demand and supply side. With 5 years of working with healthcare providers and seekers, we've been able to champion last mile delivery with hospitals and patients alike. This gives us a unique edge. We like to pride ourselves on being a player that is enabled by tech but driven by people and insights.

Affordplan Swasth is a platform designed to help both hospitals and patients. For hospitals, it is a platform locked to them that helps increase profitability by customer retention and increased usage of hospital services. For patients, Swasth card increases the financial affordability, allowing them to access good quality medical care with hospitals of their choice.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it.

Affordplan partners with hospitals to help them reach more families in financial distress. The patients get access to a YES BANK-backed prepaid card called Swasth and a digital wallet upon signing up. Payments made through Swasth towards doctor visits, lab tests, diagnostics, as well as medicine purchases, earn the patients' cost savings that are put back in the Swasth wallet to use in subsequent medical purchases. This single payment platform also allows patients to create goal-based IPD plans for elective treatment, allowing them to pay in smaller instalments ahead of their treatment while earning additional financial savings on their treatment cost.

Swasth is equipped with a chip-enabled card, digital wallet, goal-based savings, loans, and insurance. We have also included complimentary accidental insurance for emergency procedures, medical loans at zero percent interest for elective procedures, financial benefits in the form of instant cashback and exclusive hospital offers, and exclusive discounts for all the patients that have access to Swasth health card.

Affordplan Swasth allows a patient to save up to 15% on their out-of-pocket expenses at the OPD visits including doctor consultation, lab tests, and medicine purchases. Hospitals can help create better patient journeys with Swasth in the form of tailored offers on preventive check-ups, ongoing treatment regimes, and consultation. The Swasth platform also allows hospitals to take timely feedback from their patients while helping drive more efficient, contactless payment experiences.

What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

We are expanding quickly and aggressively in India. We are already in all tier-1 cities and are now quickly moving to cover all urban belts with high healthcare concentration. We will soon start opening up in UP, Punjab and other states in the North while expanding in the South with Chennai and ROK. We will also start expanding in the West moving across Maharashtra. The idea is to partner with 500+ hospitals in these territories, helping reach as many patient communities as possible.

How has technology helped democratize access to healthcare financial planning with Affordplan?

Our technology platform provides seamless integration with a number of insurance and loan companies, providing the consumers a wide number of insurance and loan choices and the ability to create IPD plans for managing IPD expenses. The platform is cloud hosted, secure, stateless, horizontally scalable and robust. It enables a very large number of concurrent requests from the consumers with a very low latency.

How is your company utilizing advanced analytics and big data?

Our analytics solution is powered by Google big query which is a serverless, highly scalable data warehouse solution powered by Google. All the transactions executed on our platform are loaded to big query for real time insights on consumer spend patterns on OPD/IPD specialties, chronic diseases and medicines.