BENGALURU: Flipkart’s digital healthcare vertical Flipkart Health+, which recently completed a drone delivery pilot to transport medicines, aims to bring innovative solutions to healthcare. Speaking to TNIE, Prashant Jhaveri, CEO, Flipkart Health+ said the beyond visual line of sight drone pilot is one such experiment we recently conducted and we may have set a world record for the longest flight over 100 km.“What is key is to convert some of these experiments and pilots and take them into production and demonstrate success at scale,” he said.
Walmart-backed e-commerce major Flipkart acquired a majority stake in SastaSundar.com marketplace platform last year and forayed into the healthcare sector with Flipkart Health+. Flipkart’s The Big Billion Days (TBBD) concluded recently, and the company said more than 65% of orders for medicines and healthcare products on Flipkart Health+ and medicines on Flipkart were placed from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
Jhaveri said the availability of medicines on its app has received a tremendous response and positive adoption from customers. “Our customers availed offers from sellers on over 83,000 healthcare products and prescription medicines,” he said. According to a KPMG-FICCI study, the e-pharmacy market was valued at $344.8 million in 2021, growing at 21.28% CAGR during 2021-2027. Also, medicine spending in India is expected to grow between 9-12% over the next five years.
With players such as Tata 1MG and Netmeds, the industry is quite competitive. When asked about it, the CEO said, “While the e-pharmacy industry has been around for close to a decade, its online penetration is still approximately 5%. Ensuring that citizens across Tier 2, Tier 3, and other remote areas benefit from the same accessibility, availability, and affordability of medicines and healthcare products as those in metro and tier-1 cities today do, is still a journey ahead.”
He believes that the opportunity lies in making healthcare ubiquitous across India and providing affordable and innovative solutions. One of the big challenges for this sector is data security. The KPMG study also said that there is a potential risk of data breaches as online platforms depend heavily on valuable insights derived from customers’ personal data. Jhaveri said that they have mandated sellers on the platform to follow stringent processes for quality checks and adhere to safety protocols to ensure only genuine pharmaceutical products reach customers.