Smart Clinic Strategy Aims to Digitize 1000 Health Clinics in Indonesia

Startups healthtech Smart Clinic aims to digitize 1.000 clinics in Indonesia in the long term, either through collaboration with clinic owners or the construction of new physical clinics. It also focuses on expanding the supporting ecosystem to strengthen the quality of its partners' health services.

In the media interview session, Co-founder & CEO of Klinik Pintar Harya Bimo said, as a pioneer in the clinical supply chain, Klinik Pintar has a strategic position to accelerate its growth. Moreover, the company is also taking advantage of the momentum from The roadmap digital transformation published by the Ministry of Health last year.

For your information, one of the main agendas of the digital transformation of the health industry is data connectivity. This agenda is in line with its efforts to digitize clinics throughout Indonesia. Based on data from the Ministry of Health in 2018, there were 2.813 hospitals, 8.841 clinics, and 9.993 health centers.

"Since the beginning, the Smart Clinic's mission has been to connect in the health industry. We believe that the biggest problem is disconnection, meaning that every health facility makes its own system and stores data, there is no attempt to connect. This effort only exists when Covid-19 occurs," said this man who is familiarly called Bimo.

Smart Clinic not only performs internal digitization with the OS Clinic (Operating System), but also connects to support networks, such as laboratories, specialist doctor referral systems, supply chains of medicines to medical devices, and insurance. In this way, clinics can be more empowered, both making it easier for patients and encouraging business.

As of March, there are 152 clinics that are part of the Smart Clinic network in 60 cities. It plans to build 20 physical clinics in 2022.

To penetrate the region, Smart Clinic always cooperates with the Indonesian Doctors Association (IDI), the Indonesian General Doctors Association (PDUI), the Association of Clinics and Health Service Facilities (PKFI), and the Indonesian Clinical Association (Asklin) and the Health Service.

Clinic ownership

Smart Clinic offers technology solutions to digitize business processes and services, standardization, and investment that can help clinic owners grow their businesses and improve value-based care.

On the tech side, they offer OS Clinic for free. At this level, clinics can access services that include a patient registration module online, physician practice scheduling, electronic medical records, electronic prescriptions, drug inventory, digital payments, to reporting.

Monetization will only be carried out when the clinic partner advances to the Prima Clinic stage. At this stage, the Smart Clinic takes a margin from service collaborations with clinic partners, such as vaccination or inventory purchases. Then, the clinic owner can move up to a higher level to manage the clinic with the Smart Clinic (co-manage). Here, both Smart Clinic and partners do profit-sharing.

"Actually, we are working on a program for clinic ownership. We work with them every day, often offered to have one equity so many percent. However, we are not interested yet because of our business model asset-lite, we don't want to have a lot of assets," he said.

However, they are considering this considering that they are quite optimistic about their business model despite the current global situation. Bimo admitted that the Smart Clinic made a profit from each service and did not 'burn money'.

"From the research conducted, many clinic owners do not know how to develop a business. Many [clinic owners] trust us to manage so that they can focus on opening their own practice. So, we have the opportunity to build clinics with partners with this model. play assets. We'll let you know when it'slaunch,"

Encouraging more clinic business sustain

In our records, the Smart Clinic previously targeted digitization of the entire health ecosystem from upstream to downstream with an initial approach to hospitals (RS). However, along the way, this effort was hampered because the hospital had a long bureaucratic chain that made it difficult to accelerate.

Usai pivot fully become a clinic supply chain provider In 2020, Bimo admitted that the Smart Clinic had achieved product-market fit. The next stage is to focus on finding clinical partners whose business can be developed in the long term. As of 2021, Smart Clinic has distributed 500 thousand patients to clinic partners. In addition, the clinic owner also admitted that his income rose by 22%.

"One of our strategies is to get into the [segment] corporate clinic. Still using the same OS, only we added employee management system that can be accessed by partners," he said.

According to him, the company is now starting to realize the importance of employee health. With this solution, companies can find out employee health data and can be an improvement in the future. Currently, Smart Clinic has managed 40.000 employees.

Trials

Bimo revealed that his party through the Indonesian Healthtech Association (AHI) had volunteered as a digitalization partner for First Level Health Facilities (FKTP). One of them is to participate in the trial of the Indonesia Health Services (IHS) platform. 

Based on the latest information, DTO is doing beta testing IHS platform and target kick off-next July. More than 90 institutions have registered to participate in the trial, including clinics, insurance, and laboratories. 

This trial includes how to integrate data into systems in health facilities and the Ministry of Health. For information, DTO will use the API-based HL7 FHIR standard as a format for exchanging health data and information. 

"The first thing that must be done is to equate the format of the medical record database in the Smart Clinic system and partners with the IHS platform. The main thing is to equate the 'language' first, then talk about connectivity which is in the [regulatory] sandbox," he added.

According to Bimo, there are other challenges in encouraging penetration in the regions. Currently the regulatory umbrella is under the Ministry of Health, but the Health Office (Dinkes) has a different perspective on the implementation of regulations in the regions so that efforts are needed so that all can be implemented. onboard against digitization.

For example, related to electronic medical records. The government is currently working on regulations related to electronic-based medical records. To achieve data connectivity in 2024, we certainly cannot wait until the regulations come out. "Dinas in the regions are confused about how to manage and conduct e-commerceforcement [to digitalization], so we have to invite them onboard," he said.