Khet Singh has us thinking that he is a philosopher by quoting author Mark Twain's heavy-duty words. "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog," says the 24-year-old, and adds, "What he (Twain) meant was rather simple — it's important to work hard and not give up." The IIM Bangalore student goes on to add, "This world that I see around and everything that is created has been imagined and built by someday before me — through hard work and passion. We would be nowhere without those people. I believe my role is to work hard and build — add to the body of work humanity creates. Otherwise, you are just taking, not giving back." And the way he has chosen to give back is by starting ClaimBuddy, an InsureTech start-up. And this is his story.
What ClaimBuddy does is makes insurance claims as easy as they can be. And those who have been there done that would have you know that when a loved one is on a hospital bed and you need to run around for insurance, it's one of the most unpleasant experiences in the world. How they have done it is by building an ecosystem that doesn't just help the patients, it helps the hospitals too. Call ClaimBuddy and they will suggest which hospital can provide you with the best treatment and coverage. They will help you figure out treatment and what it will cost after insurance coverage. Claims are processed smoothly so that you can focus on what's important — your loved one.
Second-year MBA student Khet tells us more about the beginnings of ClaimBuddy, that has processed claims of up to Rs 15 crore with over 50 partner hospitals, the challenges they face and where the start-up is headed in the next couple of years. Excerpts from a conversation.
1) Tell us in detail about what your start-up offers, from start to finish.
Our services start when the patient is recommended an admission and it ends when the hospital gets the money from the insurance company. It’s a long journey of about 45-60 days for each claim and it includes insurance eligibility checking, filing pre-approvals, getting final approvals and ensuring that the hospital gets the money from the insurance company well in time. We have six advisors who have worked in insurance companies before.
We ensure that the processing is done in a seamless manner and all the checks and balances which are monitored to a file after it reaches the insurance company are done beforehand by our team itself which, in return, ensures minimum TAT by the insurance companies to process a case.
2) We do know that you worked in the healthcare space, but why did this particular problem statement of insurance in the health sector bother you enough to take it up?
When I was working with PristynCare, my core job also included meeting people from hospital management. That is when I realised that insurance processing at hospitals is a pain point. I believe an entrepreneurial mindset is all that it takes to set up a business. We started off with our first hospital and did all the experiments with them before moving on to our second hospital.
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3) What is the bottleneck you are currently facing?
Our only challenge is to build a streamlined hospital onboarding process since each hospital would have different issues and takes their own time to close on an agreement. We plan to solve it as soon as we hit a certain count of threshold hospitals.
4) What have you learnt in this journey of being an entrepreneur?
I have worked in start-ups in the past and I am someone who believes in execution. Learnings I had from the previous two start-ups that I worked in helped me a lot. At IIMB, the ‘jugaad’ mentality met the planned execution learnings which I believe is helping me a lot to run my own start-up. Whenever there is any challenge, I always refer back to previous instances and decisions and the majority of the time, principles work well.
5) What does the future look like for ClaimBuddy?
Ten years down the line, ClaimBuddy would be ‘’everything but not medical’’ for hospitals globally. We want to take on and help hospitals to streamline their operations better in all departments so that they can focus more on the medical aspects. It includes billing, pharma, lab, insurance, medical devices and so on.
