According to estimates, there are about 1 lakh diagnostic laboratories in the country, with average revenue of Rs 2-5 lakh per lab per month. And since up to 60 percent of their capacities remain idle most of the time, most of these diagnostic labs find themselves financially sick and struggle to make both ends meet. And if Dalmia Medicare succeeds, and there is no apparent reason why it should not, in doubling the utilisation capacity of its partner labs from the current 40 percent to 80 percent, the company would not only help them double their revenues but also earn a substantial revenue for itself.

 

Dalmia Medicare, even if it partners with only 10,000 diagnostic labs (10% of total estimated diagnostic labs in India) with average revenue of Rs 5 lakh a month and takes only 10 percent of their revenues as its share, can look at a potential revenue of Rs 600 crore a year. And diagnostic labs are just one segment of the healthcare vertical.

 

“Diagnostic is just the beginning, we want to provide holistic healthcare services to people from across the country,” Sanjay Dalmia told ETHealthWorld.

 

Dalmia Medicare was recently launched with an aim to aggregate standalone diagnostic labs, training their technical staff, standardising their testing processes, bringing their quality level up to a certain standard, marketing their services and bringing more customers to them, thus helping them keep their equipments and staff busy most of the time and finally enabling them to grow their revenues and profitability and also provide satisfactory services to their customers.

 

“Hardly 20-40 percent of their equipments’ capacity is currently utilised and we aim to bring this up to 80 percent for those who become our associates and work with us to realise this,” said Dalmia.

 

Dalmia Medicare has already launched its operations with 32 standalone diagnostic labs in the national capital region. And the company plans to increase this number to 350 by the end of March 2017, before going pan-India. With such an aggressive expansion plan how will the company ensure the quality of its partner labs’ test results?

 

Dalmia said, “We realise that in this business, quality is of utmost importance. And so, we send our team of experts to monitor and check the quality of testing processes and test results of our associate labs on a regular basis. During the first month of a lab becoming our associate, the team visits the lab on a daily basis to audit the process, then they go once a week and after some time, when we feel the lab is working as per expectations, the team visits the lab once in a month. Our experts not only monitor the testing process but also the hygiene factors like how clean the lab is, how customer-friendly is the lab’s overall ambience etc.”