10 telco healthcare services

In our research into the healthcare opportunity for telcos, we’ve outlined the three layers of the value chain they can participate in: connectivity, enabling platforms and services, and applications and solutions.

Here we give some industry examples of how what telcos are doing in each of those layers of the value chain. As illustrated below, in the applications and solutions layer, there are also a range of different business models telcos are adopting. On the B2B side, in yellow, operators can develop or acquire health IT capabilities which they provide to healthcare organisations, or they can act as a channel partner / reseller for other B2B health applications. On the B2C side, telcos can likewise partner with third-party providers and market services to their existing customer bases, usually with some kind of discount attached, or they can develop and launch their own services.

10 examples of telco-led healthcare services

Source: STL Partners analysis

Of the examples highlighted here, Turkcell and Jio are two particularly interesting cases. Both of them have for the most part developed capabilities internally, although Jio has also started to partner with a growing range of medical services companies to expand its reach.

Turkcell’s hospital IT system

Turkcell has developed sophisticated health IT capabilities across a number of city hospitals as part of public private partnership (PPP). It began developing these capabilities in 2017 with Yozgat and Adana City Hospitals, and has since continued with three more hospitals in 2018 and 2019. By 2019, it had digitally processed more than 10 million patient records.

Key features available so far include:

• Patient medical record management
• Patient check-in, appointment and lab result collection kiosks
• Patient information screens
• In-hospital patient, staff and asset tracking
• Hospital CCTV and security
• Central help desk
• Service operation centre
• Analytics on hospital visitor numbers, locations, with customised dashboards for administrators

Turkcell’s ambition is to expand this initial solution into a broad ranging digital health campus solution for hospitals. (See the full presentation to the ITU here.)

Turkcell’s digital hospital campus ambition

Source: Turkcell

Jio Health Hub

Since 2017, Jio has been developing a health and fitness app, with the aim of providing consumers with a holistic health management solution. Key features included in the app so far are:

• Booking lab tests and check-ups, including discounts for some services and access to virtual consultations
• Weight management, diet and nutrition consultation
• Access to health information
• Manage and share personal medical records with doctors, family and friends
• Access a directory of doctors, dieticians, physiotherapists, attendants, counsellors
• Locate nearby pharmacy and blood banks

The Jio Health Hub was first launched in 2017. Over the following years, Jio partnered with partnered several healthcare providers to expand its services, including iCliniq which brought access to doctors across 60 specialties. However, Jio Health Hub has only really begun to scale since the beginning of the COVID pandemic when the need for digital health services became immediate. So far the app has achieved 1 million downloads, and in June 2021 it began allowing users to book COVID vaccination appointments and download CoWIN Certificates (India’s version of a COVID vaccination passport).

Other telcos’ digital health services

For more detail on the other solutions noted here, follow the links below.

• Verizon‘s BlueJeans
• STC‘s connectivity and application enablement solutions
• Orange-owned Enovacom‘s interoperability solutions
• Vivo Brazil‘s partnership with Teladoc
• Telefónica‘s partnership with Tunstall in Spain