Healthcare industry and hospital operations have witnessed a huge change in India, especially in the last two decades. Healthcare segments have seen considerable transformations including insurance penetration, star doctor availability, and standardization of services. Additionally due to rising costs of healthcare services, hospitals are now also forced to look inward on optimizing the cost of treatment for a patient. This gives a significant opportunity to a supply chain platform to work with hospitals as a partner and help them achieve this objective of optimizing cost and driving efficiency through technology.

Headquartered in Bangalore, Akna Medical is India’s first cloud based supply chain platform on a mission to simplify and transform healthcare. The firm is laser focused on supporting hospitals in transforming their procurement function into a strategic tool, resulting in driving efficiency.

Saurabh Pandey, CEO, Akna Medical says, "Aknamed platform aims to standardize healthcare by learning from consumption and forming meaningful inferences from them without any incremental input or investment from the hospital. Optimizing consumption and inventory management will have measured benefits for the hospital provider. We at Aknamed feel that effective sourcing is a tactical necessity and can be a strategic enabler for the growth and standardization of healthcare."

Bringing Change for Good
Akna Medical runs on a unique techdriven supply chain platform, their products

'SmartBuy’(a technology driven platform to empower hospitals’ procurement and inventory management) and ‘SmartChain’(a one-stop distribution solution service for manufacturers to bring data transparency) facilitate much needed transparency in healthcare delivery and cost. Having established exclusive sourcing partnerships with 600+ manufacturers for several medical products, the company offers an exhaustive and widest product basket covering pharma, surgical, consumables, vaccine, implants and lab items.

Talking about the woes of the current supply chain market in healthcare, Saurabh Pandey says, “I witnessed firsthand how fragmented the hospital supply chain and procurement process is. The 3 key actors in the value chain manufacturers, distributors and hospitals still follow predominantly offline, conventional and disintegrated ways of communication. Hospitals struggle with transparency in product pricing, manufacturers have limited visibility on sales, and both grapple with inefficient operations with little to zero use of technology. In 2018, Aknamed was conceptualized to reconstruct this ecosystem by simplifying the supplychain through technological interventions.”

Akna Medical aims at bridging bottle necks specific to the segment through its technology platform that lies at the heart of their partnership with hospitals and manufacturers. The firm has adopted an integrated approach encompassing technology, self-owned warehouses and delivery capability enabling them to service emergency requests of each of the partner hospitals.

Some of the key offerings Akna provides to its clients include Supply Chain Solutions, Full Procurement Solutions, and Diagnostic & Lab Solutions across all healthcare facilities large hospitals, singlechain hospitals, multispeciality hospitals, nursing homes, clinics & poly clinics.

Towards Greater Heights
Akna’s monthly revenue has increased from INR 4 crores in March 2020 - during the first wave of CoVID to over INR 180 crores in March 2022. This was driven by geographic expansion as well as product portfolio expansion. The firm has scaled significantly following both organic and inorganic growth strategies.

Talking about the firm’s journey and future business plans, Saurabh Pandey shares, “Adopting a strategic approach to hospital procurement, we have established ourselves as India’s largest organization disrupting the grimy hospital supply chain in a short span of 3 years. With our full basket product range and technology first approach, we are facilitating much needed transparency in healthcare delivery and cost. This has given us the opportunity to partner with 9 out of the top 10 hospital groups in India. Currently, we service over 800 hospital units in 26 cities across India daily. Expanding on our demonstrated scale and infrastructure, in the coming year, we will implement initiatives to underwrite consumption costs for hospitals, which will directly result in reducing patients’ medical bills”.