Saad Siddiqui is the Co-Founder & CEO – Find my Doctor (FMD). He came up with the idea of FIND MY DOCTOR in 2016 after he realized the lack of e-healthcare facilities in Pakistan. FMD is acting as a bridge between PMC-verified doctors, trusted and leading laboratories; and the patients. The main aim of FIND MY DOCTOR is to introduce healthcare services that are reliable, convenient, and trusting, at the utmost comfort of users.

After completing his bachelor's in social sciences with a major in economics from SZABIST, Saad Siddiqui started to work at Standard Chartered bank as an intern. He also worked as a visiting faculty in IQRA UNIVERSITY. Later on, in 2015 Mr. Siddiqui started his digital agency with the name of BUZZ, which was later on sold to his wife by him.

Following are the edited excerpts of a recent conversation BR Research had with Saad Siddiqui:

BR Research: Walk us through Find My Doctor’s journey. How did you come up with the idea?

Saad Siddiqui: Find My Doctor is a leading healthcare super app that provides healthcare services at home. Our services through our application help you book a PMC Verified doctor visit at home, book lab tests at home, and order medicine at a flat 15 percent off. We are the only player that has 13 labs on board. On the other hand, the others have only 1 or 2 partners. Further, we are also providing Insurance for locals as well as overseas Pakistanis. Recently, in partnership with KMC, we are providing FREE of cost teleconsultations through WhatsApp for the people of Pakistan. During COVID, we partnered with pharmaceutical companies and conducted more than 30,000 rapid/PCR tests in a month that too in the most reasonable rates. We were the first ones to conduct free tests in schools and Universities, to help control the spread of Covid

Find My Doctor’s journey has been very interesting. It all started in 2012 when my mother passed away due to a doctor’s negligence and I made a promise to her that I will try my best to help the common man in Pakistan in terms of healthcare issues by providing them access to affordable healthcare. I had no idea at that time how I would be doing that. In 2015 when I graduated, I started doing some research on the healthcare market. That is when I realized that there is no technology in the industry to review or rate doctors. And that is when we launched Find My Doctor and started working to reduce this gap. The business model at that time was very simple. You could book an appointment with a doctor on our App. We provided these doctors with a customer base; marketed them and also provided a rating for a flat monthly charge. But we started facing payment issues in this business model. So in 2017, we changed the business model after raising investment for the business. That’s when we started focusing on primarily healthcare services at home.

We have now partnered with KMC and adopted a public sector hospital called Sarfaraz Rafiquie Shaheed Hospital and converted it into a digital hospital. It was a neglected hospital with understaffing and a lack of facilities. We launched this digital hospital on October 23, where our doctors provide FREE online consultations to our patients using technology. Our target for the next 12 months is to conduct approximately 10 lac consultations. These consultations will help us to gather data as to what kind of diseases are prevalent in a certain area of Karachi to advise the local and provincial governments. This data collection will also help us create a patient's journey and his vulnerability to different diseases.

BRR: What is your current revenue model? And what other products are parts of your portfolio?

SS: We have various revenue-generating streams. When you call a doctor at home, we charge a fee of Rs1500. We have recently increased the charges. Previously they were Rs1000 and we are doing 350 to 400 home visits daily. The second stream of revenue in our business model is that of lab testing with a commission from the laboratories. The third is medicine delivery. And then we are also into health insurance; we’ve got a partnership with a leading bank in Pakistan and we have also been selling health insurance to overseas Pakistanis so that they can cover their sibling's and parents’ healthcare in Pakistan. We’ve got two insurance products. One is a health insurance card in partnership with Dubai Islamic Bank. The second is our product called ‘Insure Karo’, which was launched for overseas Pakistanis as I previously mentioned. This product is slightly expensive because we offer pre-existing condition coverage which no other platform is offering in Pakistan right now.

BRR: So how are you different from other online platforms that offer health services?

SS: Most of the other platforms are online booking platforms for doctors who have their clinics or are telehealth startups. On the other hand, we are completely home service providers

BRR: What is FMD’s geographical presence? And do your consultation services include general physicians and specialists both?

SS: We are in seven cities in Pakistan, but 83 percent of our business comes from Karachi. We currently have general physician in-home consultations but we do have plans to add specialized doctors to our panel in the teleconsultation domain. We have witnessed a huge influx of queries regarding gynae, diabetes, and peds domain. So now we are focusing on these segments by partnering with some organizations to add these specialized doctors to our platform for teleconsultations.

I am proud that Karachi is the only city in the country that is providing free telehealth to anyone that owns a smartphone through our platform. We recently got a request from Malawi, central Africa for a doctor, which shows that the basic problem in the developing world is access to a doctor and hence we want to make at least this first step free for all.

BRR: What kind of challenges do you face regularly?

SS: We haven’t been facing any ethical or regulatory challenges as such so far. Sometimes, the patients don’t show up on time for their teleconsultations or there are some behavioral and discriminatory issues for example with female doctors. And in such cases, the doctors get very demotivated.