A moment with Dr Shravan Verma (Class of 2014)| MEDICUS 2024 Issue 1

Championing home hospital care, together
By Dr Shravan Verma (Class of 2014), Co-founder and CEO of Speedoc

With more polyclinics and hospitals, why would anybody want home visits? And you guys don’t even know your gross margins, product runway or the amount of capital you need.

That was the response my business partner and I got from our first early investor meeting where we pitched the idea for Speedoc. It was bruising and enough for my partner, who was a fellow medical officer, to call it quits.

Despite the hammering, I still believed in our proposition. With a rapidly ageing population, Singapore is facing a hospital shortage. So, we either build 100s hospitals or we do something different. And my vision for Speedoc is to bridge this gap. Speedoc aims to create an ecosystem, where any bed can become a hospital bed; where patients can receive seamless care in their homes—whether that’s through a doctor’s visit, treatment from a nurse, delivery of medications or follow-up tele-consults.

So, at age 28, I sat down to learn the basics of financing a business: how to build a financial model and calculate my gross margins, profitability and revenue.

And after failing to find a new business partner, I was ready to do this on my own. I even printed my first business cards.

A chance encounter

I was always very inspired by the giants in the tech industry, like Tesla and Apple. So, in May 2017, I went to the Tech in Asia conference, where I hoped to learn how other startups like Grab and Carousell were built and meet more venture capitalists who might be interested in funding my idea.

I met Serene [Cai], pretty much by chance in a small group discussion. She wanted to create a telemedicine or virtual healthcare solution. I had this vision for a virtual hospital. She comes with a great marketing and communications background. I had healthcare expertise, knowledge and connections. We saw the immediate synergies, so we decided to give this a go—together.

And I feel a huge sense of gratitude that we became co-founders. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, on which you may not have people to talk to because your board and investors are always evaluating you, and your team is looking up to you. At the same time, you’re questioning, Are we doing the right thing? Is it sustainable? Will we survive because 90 per cent of startups don’t? As a founder, you have to convince people that what you’re building will materialise into something.

Having a co-founder gives you someone to lean on. Serene is the one person I can share my doubts or worries with, someone who I know is as vested as I am in overcoming the small hiccups as well as the daunting challenges, like those moments when you think, Will this work?

That was the biggest challenge in our early days. We didn’t get much acceptance from other doctors. We encountered many who felt that everything had already been tried and tested, it’s not going to work, people don’t want that, and don’t need it.

The biggest factor that helped us to know that we were going in the correct direction was our personal experience with patients, like the visit we paid to a three-year-old girl, who had a fever. We visited her, left a urine container as we suspected a possible urinary tract infection, and went for another nearby visit. When the mother had collected the sample, she messaged and we went back, tested the sample and sure enough it was a UTI. We gave the girl some antibiotics and resolved the whole thing for the family at home in just a couple of hours. The parents were so grateful.

Shravan Verma

Shravan Verma on his rounds // Credit: Speedoc

That’s our biggest motivating factor. The patients we’re seeing wouldn’t be able to get this kind of care at home, had it not been for everyone who made Speedoc happen.

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Expect the unexpected

We also grow and learn. Now, we expect hiccups. We take them as challenges that are put along the way for us to build something even better. With that attitude and mentality, whenever a new challenge pops up, we just work out how to navigate around it and come up with a clear timeline to resolve it and move on.

While Serene and I are each other’s biggest supporters, we also fight a lot because we have quite different perspectives. I tend to think three, five years down the line, whereas she is also focused on the issues that we need to deal with in three weeks. I still approach the business with an engineering mindset, so I’m focused on the products we’re building, the tools and platform and the overall direction. I am also a big stickler for design—from UI/UX to the look and feel of the brand. Serene is a very good communicator—our tonality, how we should reach out, how we communicate with different stakeholders and motivate the team.

Reconciling our different perspectives and appetite for risk hasn’t always been easy but we’ve learnt to respect each other’s views and when it is better to agree to disagree, like what colour should our logo be. At the same time, we sharpen each other’s ideas, so that we truly create a value-added service to patients.

Credit: Norfaezah Abdullah, Duke-NUS

I also turned to meditation to calm me down and help make the path somehow clearer. When I meditate, I can suddenly think of certain solutions, especially when I close off all my senses. And a lot of times that kind of intuition has worked out. Like when we faced the real possibility that we couldn’t pay our employees. In moments like that meditating can help me find an idea—it is usually who I can reach out to in our network of supporters.

Having such a network and continually going out there to make new connections has saved us more than once. For example, I was invited by the Singapore Management University to share a bit about Speedoc with their students. One of the student mentors happened to be there and was intrigued by what we were building. After some more conversations, she ended up being one of our very early Angel investors. So, you never know who your next supporter will be.

Through and beyond the pandemic

When the pandemic struck, we became involved in supporting frontline healthcare efforts. From COVID screening at dormitories to at-home vaccinations, we continued to demonstrate the value and possibilities of fully decentralised mobile healthcare—even if it sometimes meant scrambling to pull together the necessary resources.

And unlike many other changes introduced during the pandemic, what this year has really shown is that the need for our hospital-at-home concept goes well beyond the pandemic and there’s huge demand for non-COVID conditions, too. So, what we’re hoping is that 25 per cent of today’s hospital admissions can be managed at home and that Speedoc can offer that.

I believe that in three to five years, almost every hospital will have a home-hospital programme to be able to better address their patients’ needs. But right now, they’re not set up for running a home-hospital programme. And that’s where we complement and support them.

As told to Nicole Lim, Senior editor.