Medical Fundraising Communities

One of the biggest problems in the world today, is people not being able to afford medical treatments they need. We have the hospitals, we have the resources, we have the collective money, but there is economic inequality. Existing solutions like Ketto, ImpactGuru, DonateKart and local foundations are able to solve less than 5% of cases that come and many people just die waiting for the money to come.

Why is it so?

• Funding is always interest based. Someone who has suffered heart attack is far more likely to help another with heart problem.

• Funding is feeling based. People are attached to their own doctors and are far more likely to help others in same hospital.

• Funding is typically local. If my neighbor needs help, I will do it. If I see 10,000 cancer patients asking for ₹ 5 crore each, I will run away.

• Funding needs to professionally managed. If so many people are asking for charity when they can return the money in the future, why should I give so much?

• Funding needs to be intelligent. There have to advisors. Someone is admitted in ₹₹₹ Apollo asking for ₹ 50 crore for an experimental injection that will prolong his life for 7 days. No thank you.

• Insurance: Most people can not afford it, it doesn't cover everything and it covers only a % of the expenses.

• Existing solutions rely on advertising, mass spamming and cold-calling, which do not align well with the above principles. They display crying, painful images of patients to guilt-trip and convince donors, but donors just get overwhelmed and run away.

Technology Guruji, with his social service, commercial and charitable fundraising expertise, sees this as an easily solvable problem.

What can be done?

• Build hyperlocal communities with hospitals at their center. Register patients by visits. Cluster by interests, specialities that the patients have consulted for.

• Have an app for the hyperlocal communities.

• Provide value added services. People's favorite local doctors will share videos like how to prevent indigestion, what to do about hairfall, weight watching, etc. Local dietician service and virtual doctor follow up. 

• Build funding pools. Rich person visited normal hospital near him. Now he can easily donate some money into the pool.

• Money will be managed by professional funding pool managers. Donors will not be continuously contacted.

• Funding will be split between medical loan, soft loan, and grants. App will provide workflow for reminders and collection of money.

• Have consultants who will advise people on where money will come from. They will analyse the patients' net worth, expenses, money needs and earning potential, before offering a grant or soft loan.

• All hospitals will install the app. Fund pool managers and consultants will be common betweeen hospitals.

• Small portion of the funding pools will be used to pay app cost, consultant salary, pool managers fee and executive management salary.

• App will used for higher-order workflows like refer-to-other-hospital, who-can-transfer-this-patient, bid-for-this-patient, who-can-treat-this-patient-at-earliest, follow-up-with-doctor, get-diagnostic-feedback, etc.

• App will have additional feature, satisfaction gift. A lot of doctors treat patients for cheap, to serve society and help out everyone. But then the richer patients also do not give much money, and doctors wonder if they should prescribe additional procedures or text or ask if they are satisfied and if they get for more money. We will standardize the procedure and make it socially acceptable.

• Once people become dependent of the app for all the value added features, they will keep donating because they will be reminded of the good work they are doing and keep using the app for all the value added features we will provide.

Chugh Foundation has partnered with Mayank Hospital and Blue Heart Foundation to combine our innovation expertise with their medical expertise. Mayank Hospital brings decades of experience in not just hospital and foundation management, but is also a market leader in building and selling hospital software. Together, we aspire to solve the medical fundraising problems that the world is struggling with today, to move towards a brighter tomorrow.

The global hospital services market is 20 Trillion $ industry, our R&D costs are not very high, customer acquisition is cheap and straightforward. This will turn into a social network without much attrition, and we can use facebook as a case study to demonstrate how much money social networks make. Without going into the exact details, we state that we are looking at an extremely lucrative business. 

This is a 20% finished R&D project which will graduate into a for-profit business. We will intelligently collect money and will not charge money from poor people for this initiative.