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With Zoctr healthcare comes home

by IBNS 23 Feb 2016, 09:42 am

New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS) Not everyone can afford long hospital stays. Hospitals too are trying to cut down average length of stay of patients in order to provide critical care to more. In such a situation theres a huge imperative for home healthcare services that can take over when the hospital visit ends.

The trouble is it is hard to find all services under roof - you might find nursing care here, doctor visits at another platform, equipment support at still another.

Mumbai based start-up Zoctr Health aims to fill this gap by attempting to create India’s first fully integrated Healthcare Aggregator Platform. 


Using the Zoctr Website and Mobile App patients can find all their home health, telehealth and remote monitoring based services under one roof.

World over, health economists have pointed out that disruption in healthcare will happen when home healthcare services take off. It can save the economy millions of rupees as the cost of care at home is a fraction of what it would cost at a hospital. Fired by the zeal to disrupt healthcare delivery in India, 40-year old management professional Nidhi Saxena set up Zoctr.

Saxena is no stranger to healthcare – having been associated with it for the past 7-8 years and having set up a successful clinical research organisation Karmic Lifesciences. “I quit my job in the US wanting to set up a business that has the potential to make a deep social impact. Healthcare was a natural choice for me. Moreover, it’s a highly scalable business that is both under-served and inflation-proof,” says Saxena.

Zoctr aims to offer a seamless post discharge experience to Post Acute, Post Operative, Terminally ill and chronic patients with a high degree of personalization. 

In a way, Saxena’s personal experience led to her start Zoctr. 

Her father developed post surgery complications after treatment at a well known Delhi hospital and needed a repeat surgery. 

“This experience helped me realise that post discharge, the hospital and doctors get busy attending to new patients. This is the time when the patient suffers from high emotional anxiety and pain and needs expert medical care. The patient’s family does not get someone at the hospital to speak to. This is in sharp contrast to the West, where the entire treatment is outcome based,” says Saxena.

When Saxena looked around, she found thousands of patients with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or Diabetes who needed long term support and care at home. 

This led her to launch Zoctr as she believes home healthcare offers affordability and accessibility to patients. As a business it is highly scalable – Saxena has ambitions of expanding to 20 cities & touching 45 per cent of India’s population.

Just 9 months old, Zoctr is already touching and transforming lives, serving close to 2000 patients. It started off in Mumbai, where Saxena already had a relationship with several hospitals and found it easier to tie up with them. Soon after it entered Delhi, which is fast emerging as India’s biggest home healthcare market, Pune, Kolkata, Ahmadabad and Bengaluru were the next markets. In the next 12 months we plan to grow to 18 Indian cities, including metros.

User adoption is the key to success of for Zoctr believes Saxena and for this she and her team are sewing up strategic partnerships with hospitals.

“We are meeting several top hospitals, nursing bureaus and other players in the healthcare industry in the top 8 cities. We will partner with 4-5 hospitals there and start offering services to over 10,000 new patients in the coming months,” she says.

Saxena is also mindful of the fact that the service has to deliver value to patients so that they keep coming back to the app or give word of mouth referrals because of positive user experience. Digital Marketing and Below the Line Marketing are important drivers to adoption too and Zoctr has just launched its awareness building campaign in the media.

Key to delivering a great experience is in sewing up the right professionals to take care of home health needs of patients. “We are setting our own benchmarks while selecting staff and servicing our customers. We focus on the training, psychographic profiling and criminal records of people getting associated with us,” says Saxena.

“We also look at adding soft skills dimension. Hence, if we find the attitude of our nurses or doctors is not up to the mark we reject them. We also have a strong feedback mechanism. We take customer feedback over phone, e-mail and in person.”

A host of technological inputs are going into making the Zoctr User Experience (UX) great. 


“Zoctr can track its resources on GPS and has provided for an emergency button in the app for patients and staff. So, at the press of a button an emergency alarm is triggered and we get activated in no time,” describes Saxena.

“I believe we can do wonders if we stay focused on strengthening Zoctr processes and technology platform,” says Saxena. The true test lies ahead as more and more Indians see the merits of embracing home healthcare.