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The Rise of Healthcare Delivery Enablers

Yash Gokhroo
June 11, 2025

The Hidden Strain in India’s Hospital Infrastructure

India’s healthcare infrastructure is expanding rapidly—with over ₹32,500 crore in capex expected to add ~30,000 hospital beds by FY28. Yet, despite this physical growth, the sector’s financial and operational metrics tell a more sobering story:
  • EBITDA Margins for listed private hospitals average between 17–19%, far lower than global peers.
  • Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) for leading chains like Apollo, Fortis, and Narayana Health typically ranges between 14–17%, barely above capital costs.
  • Receivables Cycles stretch up to 90–120 days, especially for government and TPA-funded patients.
  • Occupancy Rates hover around 60–65%, signaling underutilized infrastructure.
  • Poor NPS and patient experience due to broken and fragmented patient journey
  • Many mid-sized hospitals continue to rely heavily on physician referrals and have limited digital marketing capabilities or financial tools to optimize performance.
Simply put, building beds alone won’t solve healthcare access or economics in India. What the system needs is a parallel wave of healthcare delivery enablers—startups and technologies that act as force multipliers for hospital profitability, productivity, and patient experience.
Healthcare delivery enablers are B2B or B2B2C platforms that improve revenue, profitability, and cash flow for hospitals. These companies don’t deliver care themselves but improve how care is accessed, financed, and managed.
They are solving problems across four critical layers:

1. Capacity Utilization: Making Hospital Beds Work Harder

Many hospitals in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities have excess capacity during weekdays, especially in elective procedures. Surgery aggregators like Hexa Health are helping bridge this gap.
  • Hexa Health offers price transparency, guided consultations, and end-to-end coordination.
  • Its tech platform improves lead conversion, surgery preparedness, and post-op follow-up, ensuring patients get care faster and hospitals increase weekday utilization.
  • ML models help match patients to the most appropriate provider based on location, insurance, and surgical complexity.
This is a demand aggregation play, helping hospitals unlock idle infrastructure—akin to how MakeMyTrip helps fill hotel rooms midweek.

2. Financing & RCM: Bringing Predictability to Hospital Cashflows

Receivable management remains a massive friction point in Indian healthcare. Many patients are covered by insurance but face delays in pre-authorization or reimbursement.
ClaimBuddy provides instant financing to insured patients, reducing the dropout rate at admission and helping hospitals collect cash earlier. Increasingly, we’re also seeing the application of AI and LLMs in streamlining these processes:
  • Arintra is an AI-powered coding platform that auto-generates clinical and billing codes using unstructured EMR notes.
  • It improves claims accuracy, reduces denial rates, and accelerates revenue realization.
  • RapidClaims brings automation to claims adjudication and appeals—creating a new benchmark in processing time and payout predictability.
As insurance penetration deepens, these tools are becoming essential for revenue cycle optimization—helping hospitals convert patient demand into realized cash faster.

3. Digital Marketing & Patient Acquisition: Building the Hospital Funnel

In an age of mobile-first patients, hospitals must become adept at digital demand generation and engagement. Players like Practo and Eka Care are enabling this shift:
  • Practo helps hospitals publish online profiles, accept bookings, and engage patients post-visit.
  • Eka Care enables hospitals to maintain longitudinal health records, improving retention and compliance.
  • Both platforms are layering AI and analytics for lead scoring, reactivation campaigns, and personalized outreach.
LLMs are also being explored to generate specialty-specific content, automate outbound messaging, and create CRM tools tailored to patient behavior and compliance risk.

4. Workflow Optimization: Operational Intelligence for Clinical Teams

Hospital workflows—from triaging and nurse handoffs to discharge summaries—are often inefficient and paper-bound. This leads to burnout, delays, and medical errors.

MyHealthcare, HealthPlix, and others are digitizing hospital operations across departments:

  • MyHealthcare offers a full-stack platform that tracks patient flow, flags bottlenecks, and streamlines clinical documentation.
  • HealthPlix EMR supports doctors with specialty-specific templates and dashboards.
  • These tools are now embedding AI assistants that generate clinical summaries, guide evidence-based decisions, and flag anomalies in patient records.
As ABDM standards mature and integration becomes crucial, we anticipate more workflow-native AI tools that improve both provider productivity and patient safety.

5. Enhancing Patient Experience: Building Trust and Simplifying Navigation

Beyond financial and operational inefficiencies, one of the most persistent gaps in India’s healthcare delivery system is the patient experience. From the moment a patient receives a diagnosis to the time of discharge, the journey is often fragmented, opaque, and anxiety-inducing. Patients frequently struggle with lack of clarity on pricing, confusion about insurance processes, poor coordination between stakeholders, and an absence of reliable handholding. Healthcare delivery enablers are increasingly addressing this trust and navigation gap—by simplifying the journey and making care more accessible, transparent, and empathetic.
  • Hexa Health improves patient experience through dedicated concierge support, helping patients:
    • Navigate surgical options with transparent pricing
    • Book consultations and procedures across partner hospitals
    • Coordinate logistics, documentation, and follow-ups seamlessly
  • ClaimBuddy enhances the reimbursement journey by:
    • Providing real-time pre-approval support for insured patients
    • Working directly with TPAs and hospitals to reduce bottlenecks
    • Offering interim financing options to reduce friction at admission
These interventions are helping hospitals convert trust into tangible business impact—improving patient retention, boosting NPS, and ultimately raising throughput without compromising quality of care.

The US Lens: What India Can Learn

Globally, especially in the US, the RCM and operational stack for hospitals has become a hotbed for innovation, often led by AI-native players:
  • Cedar, and Notable have raised significant capital to automate back-office functions and patient engagement.
  • Nabla, Abridge, and Suki AI are deploying LLMs to auto-summarize clinical conversations, reducing the documentation burden for doctors.
  • Ambience Healthcare is building full-stack AI agents that act as virtual scribes, coders, and revenue analysts—shaping the future of digital front desks.
These models demonstrate the power of AI to lower labor costs, improve billing accuracy, and reduce admin overheads, freeing up clinicians to focus on care. India’s healthtech enablers can take inspiration here, while tailoring solutions to local infrastructure and payor dynamics.

Why LLMs & AI Are a Natural Fit for Healthcare Enablement

Healthcare workflows—be it clinical documentation, billing, patient coordination, or compliance—are deeply structured yet human-dependent. This makes them ideal for intelligent automation.
Key applications include:
  • Clinical documentation: Auto-generating summaries, discharge notes, and prescriptions.
  • Coding and billing: Extracting ICD/CPT codes using LLMs from doctor-patient interactions.
  • Front desk AI: Automating eligibility checks, consent workflows, and appointment triaging.
  • Smart CRM: Personalizing follow-ups and reactivation nudges using AI-generated prompts.
We’re moving from digitization to true intelligence in workflows, where LLMs become co-pilots for hospital staff.

What Founders Can Build

There is a massive white space in India for workflow-first healthtech platforms that do one thing extremely well—whether it’s managing surgical funnels, insurance workflows, CRM, or nurse scheduling. We’re excited by startups that are:
  • Creating AI-powered hospital assistants to boost operational efficiency
  • Building vertical SaaS platforms with plug-and-play analytics
  • Automating clinical and financial documentation for speed and accuracy
  • Developing digital storefronts and engagement stacks for hospitals
These aren’t just feature plays – they are infrastructure opportunities for a $100B+ healthcare economy.

Final Thoughts

As India’s healthcare footprint grows, we need more than brick-and-mortar expansion. We need intelligence layers that help hospitals run better—operationally, financially, and experientially.

Healthcare delivery enablers—especially those powered by AI and LLMs—are poised to become the backbone of this transformation.

If you’re building in this space, we’re eager to partner with you.

#DigitalHealth #AIinHealthcare #HealthTechIndia #LLMs #HospitalTech #B2BHealthcare

Sources:

ICRA Report (Capex investments by private hospitals)

  • → ET Healthworld Article

EBITDA Margins of Listed Hospitals

  • → Fortis Healthcare Q4 FY24 Investor Presentation

ROCE (Return on Capital Employed) for Listed Hospitals

  • → Apollo & Fortis Investor Presentations (2023–24)
  • → Example: Fortis Q3 FY24 Earnings Call

Receivable Cycles in Hospitals

  • → EY Healthcare Report & Industry Analyst Insights
  • → Business Today Feature on Hospital Receivables

Hospital Occupancy Rates

  • → Crisil Report on Hospital Sector Outlook