Nixon Widjaja
Loyola Marymount University
Jeff Thies
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AlteaCare is a health services company based in Indonesia with its main service being teleconsultation and virtual health services. It also offers a variety of other services such as the purchasing and delivery of prescription drugs, supplements, and vitamins, and vaccination registration and support. All of this can be done in its all-in-one encompassing app. AlteaCare’s main innovation comes in the form of how it offers its teleconsultation service. AlteaCare is one of the few teleconsultations and virtual health companies in Indonesia and that is already a big achievement in and of itself. They though innovated to separate themselves from their competitors by conducting teleconsultation through real-time video calls from the app not just through chats and text messages. Alvin Salim, a business analyst at AlteaCare, mentions that AlteaCare has been able to serve 150,000 users as they are able and more suited to serve chronic patients and allowed its customers to be able to convey their conditions and illnesses much better to the doctors by allowing them to talk in real-time and show more through video call. Furthermore, it has also created better relationships between the users and the doctors along with increased trust and better communication. This innovation by AlteaCare is also further enhanced through the innovation of the app which allows users to schedule and conduct teleconsultation all through the app. AlteaCare also provides the service of allowing the users to purchase their prescribed medicine through the app afterward and get it delivered to them. This has provided a lot of ease and comfort for the users as well as saved them a lot of time and trouble.
AlteaCare’s innovation is a major contributor to SDG #3, Good Health and Well-Being as it has helped ensure healthier lives for the people as well as promote well-being by health care being much easier and accessible. It has also allowed more patients to be treated and be able to seek help, fix a lot of the capacity and facility issues of the industry, and helped in alleviating a lot of the disruptions caused by the pandemic.
Indonesia has the 4th largest population in the world with around 279 million people, but it has one of the lowest health care and services conditions in Southeast Asia. Indonesia faces many challenges and problems in terms of health care such as having an inadequate ratio of doctors to patients with there being too few doctors to handle the large population and number of patients. Indonesia also only has 2,488 hospitals and it amounts to 1.21 hospital beds per 1,000 people. Indonesia also faces geographical disproportions with its many islands as the majority of these doctors and hospitals are located on the main island of Java and this has left many of the lower populated and farther-reaching islands to weigh a heavier burden in terms of health care. This has caused a need for healthcare that is more accessible and easier to use for the population and this is where AlteaCare comes in.
AlteaCare’s Co-Founders Mikaela Oen and William Suryawan saw this need for accessible healthcare and sought to find a solution for the people of their country. They founded AlteaCare to help provide a solution to these issues so that patients from any part of the country would be able to not only get health care consultation but also be able to get it from the best of the country no matter how far away they are from the doctor or hospital. They also realized the many other challenges faced by the population of Indonesia even the ones that are located in Java. These challenges include financial issues, lack of time due to work, traffic congestion issues, long-wait hours, and congested hospitals. The pandemic also made matters worse with people having to social distance and stay home which means they are not able to meet doctors to help with their health issues, and the ones that are suffering heavily either are also too scared to go to the doctors due to the chance of catching the virus or they go and they might get the virus or be turned away due to the hospitals being full from a lack of capacity. The pandemic showed how many virtual teleconsultation services are needed so people can get health care in the safety of their homes. Due to this, the Co-Founders created AlteaCare so that no matter what issue or problem the people are facing, they can still be able to get quality healthcare easily from the comfort and safety of their homes. As the Co-Founder William Suryawan said, “Our mission is to become the digital gateway between hospitals and patients, especially those who struggle to access health services in person”, and hopefully with their continued success and expansion more and more people will be able to get access to health care in Indonesia.
Even before the pandemic, the challenges were widely felt by the people and hospitals of Indonesia. This was even made worse due to the pandemic and the continuing rising population. AlteaCare has helped in alleviating these problems for both hospitals and the people. For the hospitals, it has allowed them to provide more services to more people as well as help with the safety of their staff during the pandemic. For the people, it has allowed more accessibility and ease of use in terms of health care. During the pandemic, it has also provided vaccine services to the people such as registration and allowing them to experience health care safely at home. It has also helped the government in providing tests and helped in allowing the social restrictions to be reinforced and followed as people do not need to go out to see the doctor. As AlteaCare continues to grow and more hospitals partners with them, the impact will be felt even greater with now there being a new option for patients and doctors to meet and it will help alleviate a lot of the current challenges greatly.
With AlteaCare’s real-time video call teleconsultation service as well as its multi-service application, it has brought them major business benefits. For one, it can currently be seen as the teleconsultation company with the most services and benefits for the customers due to the wide range of services of the app such as medicine deliveries and vaccination services. Their real-time video calls are also a big differentiator for their users. The benefits are also already being felt by the company with their number of users already rising to more than 100,000 users. Alvin also mentioned that this number is expected to rise as from his work, he has seen that it is continuing to steadily increase and more people are starting to know about them. It has also increased its number of partnered hospitals from only 1 at the beginning to now 17 hospitals with a plan of further increasing it to 30. This shows the rise in popularity not only among users but also among their business partners hospitals. It has also provided benefits to the business of its partnering hospitals as well. A quote from William Suryawan is that he said, “This means that hospitals have new channels to help them reach new patients during the pandemic. So, the presence of telemedicine is not to compete with other hospitals”. AlteaCare has allowed its partnered hospitals to be able to serve more patients as well as serve new patients that were not accessible before. This has allowed the hospitals to increase their number of patients overall and it has brought increased business for them and also for AlteaCare.
The availability of AlteaCare has allowed more patients to gain access to health care and has solved a lot of the issues that patients in Indonesia had been facing. AlteaCare’s benefits for the users shone even brighter during the pandemic with people still able to experience health care even while being on lockdown in their homes. Alvin mentioned that their services have not only benefited their users but also the other patients in the hospital as a new channel of service for the hospitals, it has led to reduced congestion and wait times. AlteaCare’s plans of expansion are also a step in the right direction as with more hospitals partnering and offering this service, it will lead to even more accessibility and benefits for the population. AlteaCare also is being a leader of being an example in the health care industry of Indonesia by showing that it can be successful while also giving what the people need and that technology can bring a lot of good, and hopefully more will follow in its footsteps.
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Alvin Salim, Business Analyst
