In India, 30,000 dentists graduate every year for 309 dental colleges. Yet 50% give up dentistry, as an investment in a new clinic is about Rs12 lacs and it takes about 10 years for a clinic to be profitable.
In India, South Asia, Africa, and South America 90% of the people do not have access to dental care. Even in developed countries dental care is extremely expensive. And 70% of the population in these countries suffer from a dental problem they don’t know exists.
If Mouth is the gateway to good health, then oral hygiene and dental care become the starting point of any health care conversation.
Vivek Madappa, a serial entrepreneur in exponential technologies decided to address this problem by combining two seemingly disparate ideas to offer a solution that could revolutionize dental care.
Here is the story of a start-up from Bangalore, India that has combined Mobile Dentistry with Digital Technology to launch MobiDent Digital Dentistry.
Mobile Dentistry: Caddy Clinic
Caddy Clinic – Worlds lightest Dental Clinic in a suitcase was an ambitious project conceptualized by a team at MobiDent to build a mobile dental clinic that has “Italian design, German engineering at Indian prices”.
The Caddy Clinic has a compressor and a suction unit integrated inside a suitcase, a lightweight dental recliner chair, a toolbox, and a spitoon. The entire clinic can be transported in a small car or three-wheeler. The time take to unpack is less than 3 minutes.
Digital Technology
For the consumers, MobiDent offers a Digital App to book a Dentist appointment. The dentists closest to the consumer’s home is matched using Ai to confirm the appointment. For the dentists, the entire reception desk has been replaced by a digital clinic management platform that manages appointment scheduling, automated customer engagement, patient reports, archiving and easy retrieval of records, billing, etc.
MobiDent: Digital Dentistry Anytime Anywhere
To give a perfect elaboration about MobiDent, Vivek stated an example of the hand sanitizer. This product has journeyed from operation theatre used by surgeons to consumers’ pockets as a lifestyle product. Similarly, MobiDent aims to deliver preventive dental care at people’s homes, instead of a clinic. In simple terms, MobiDent is the Uber of Dentistry.
Preventive dental care the new health care fashion
When people hear dental care they associate negative feelings of fear, pain, lack of time and expensiveness. With the growing trend of “selfies”, social validation and vanity, MobiDent is focused on promoting preventive dental care as either a healthy habit or special occasion habit. For the health-conscious MobiDent offers family care service and for socially conscious, MobiDent offers dental care for special occasions.
MobiDent Academy for Digital Dentistry
MobiDent over the last 4 years has organized dental camps at more than 400 organizations, 20 hospital OPDs, 300 homes and treated more than 65,000 people. MobiDent team regularly organizes CSR activities at old age homes, orphanages, and NGOs. Furthermore, to ensure consistent quality the dentists are trained at MobiDent Academy for Digital Dentistry (MADE). This academy tracks as well as measures the knowledge and skills of every dentist. Only dentists who have completed 2500 procedures are certified for home visits.
Digital Revolution in healthcare
The technology-oriented CEO of MobiDent believes that for a revolution in health care the medical care needs to shift from corrective care at hospitals to preventive care at homes. Hospitals only offer sick care. He believes the future of health care will see an attitudinal & behavioral shift with consumers taking responsibility for their own health. When data is digitized, the cost of storing, transfer, retrieval, and analysis into information greatly reduces. Consumers will start using IoT wearable to track and monitor their vital signs. These advances in technology will ignite a massive shift to preventive healthcare, self-medication and lifestyle changes to stay healthy to avoid expensive hospital visits.
MobiDent’s vision is to make dental care accessible to 200 million people by 2022 at less than $10 in areas like India, Asia, Africa, and South America.
