Ziqitza Healthcare
1298 Ambulances Offering Service for All
1298's growing fleet of ambulances is providing much-needed emergency medical services in Mumbai.
The Challenge
- Mumbai is a city of 16 million people, yet it lacks any reliable ambulance or emergency medical response service. People use autorickshaws, private cars, or van “ambulances” that have no medical equipment or trained technicians to take patients to the hospital. More often, these ambulances function only as hearses.
- The poor suffer disproportionately from the lack of these services because they face greater transportation challenges but have lesser means to pay.
The Innovation
- 1298’s focus is on providing service for all. Its business model uses a sliding price scale driven by ability to pay, which is determined by the kind of hospital to which patients choose to be taken. Those who are admitted to general wards of a Government Hospital, ultimately the poorest patients, are given a subsidized rate of 50%. 15-20% of the services are offered at subsidized rates or are free of cost.
- The ambulances are controlled by a state-of-the-art call centre available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that identifies the ambulance closest to an emergency and directs the ambulance team.
- 1298 has also developed training programs, certified by the American Heart Association and New York Presbyterian Hospital, to train its own emergency care doctors and technicians.
The Impact
- 1298 has grown from 10 ambulances in Q1 of 2007 to 81 ambulances by Q1 of 2009.
- More than 40,000 calls have been made in the last 3 years. Over 6,000 of those calls were free or subsidized for patients, making the service available across all strata of the society.
- 1298 is scaling up its network by expanding into new districts – with 10 ambulances in Patna and 25 ambulances in Kerala. There are also plans to expand into 7 new cities with more than 400 ambulances over the next two years.
- 1298 has also received valuable support from several institutions that have donated ambulances to 1298 as they see that this is a truly efficient and accountable way of providing life-saving emergency services to all sections of society. 1298 has also obtained corporate sponsorship of all its ambulances by a leading insurance company.
- 1298’s pay-per-use model has the potential to be replicated not only in other Indian cities, but also around the world.