A certified Chartered Accountant and passionate about entrepreneurship, finance and the startup ecosystem, Nupur boasts of an illustrious 8+ years long career during which she worked with corporates like KPMG and Unilever, and has co-founded two healthcare startups as well.

Valued at approximately $372 billion annually, the Indian healthcare sector faces a significant challenge with nearly 48 percent of expenditures being completely out of pocket. Even for those with health insurance, numerous treatments like secondary care surgeries (including dermatological, general surgeries, dental procedures, IVF, and others) remain uncovered. Consequently, patients often find themselves shouldering the burden of medical expenses, leading to delays in necessary treatments due to financial constraints, ultimately impacting their quality of life. To address this issue, several innovative solutions have emerged recently, facilitating the financing of medical expenses at the point of care, thereby enhancing accessibility and affordability for patients.

Latest Tech Advancements & Regulatory Frameworks

Be it in terms of regulatory frameworks, infrastructure or any other aspect, the fintech ecosystem has undergone a massive change over the last five years. Today, advancements in digital infrastructure have enabled hassle-free processing of the entire lending and financing process. For example, the KYC process for loan applications of patients can now be done completely digitally. Also, risk assessment to decide credit approval has become completely automatic via digital mediums, enabling finance companies to offer tailor-made solutions to their customers. Given the ever-evolving technologies that have come-up over the last few years, there are also stringent regulatory policies and frameworks being imposed around healthcare and financing to make sure that the services remain customer-centric. In light of this, the RBI too has introduced clear and distinct guidelines to ensure the security and privacy of patient data, for regulated and non-registered entities.

A significant part of the healthcare spend in the country still being out of pocket presents a huge scope for innovating new solutions that could help patients finance their treatments and get proper medical attention.

Innovation by Fintechs

Since out-of-pocket healthcare expenses pose a serious financial challenge to most individuals, patients are now increasingly relying on such healthcare financing solutions. To efficiently cater to this growing demand, we are witnessing a lot of innovations happening in the healthcare financing space in India from both startups and established companies. With innovations in the fintech space like embedded finance, fintech startups are emerging to provide financing options in non-traditional domains at the point of payment itself. For instance, we at CarePay, offer zero-cost loans to patients at point of care to finance their healthcare expenses in a completely digital manner. Additionally, a few startups are also developing bite-sized insurance, which are short-term insurance policies for specific use cases.

The Government’s Role in Nourishing Healthcare Financing

The Indian government has been playing a very proactive role in encouraging the startup ecosystem across all industries by announcing numerous schemes and initiatives. One such noteworthy initiative is the Fund of Funds for Startups (FFS) scheme. The government should also look at specific allocations for investments in health technology to encourage new innovations in the healthcare financing space. Additionally, the government can even support the concept of ‘Blended Finance’ in the healthcare sector. Blended finance models have successfully worked in other sectors such as infrastructure and renewable energy, and if introduced in healthcare, it can be a game changer.

Future Prospects for Fintech Startups

Although our country’s healthcare expenditure is growing by 20 percent Y-o-Y, India still has a long way to go to become a completely insurance-driven healthcare ecosystem. A significant part of the healthcare spend in the country still being out of pocket presents a huge scope for innovating new solutions that could help patients finance their treatments and get proper medical attention. As a result, fintech companies are investing a lot of time and effort on R&D to develop new solutions in this regard. Thus, going forward, I expect a large number of innovative solutions being launched into the market which will either help increase the insurance penetration or provide financial aid to those who need it.