Franchise Model For Indian Health Market

According to a report by Assocham and research firm RNCOS India's healthcare market may see a threefold jump in value terms to USD 372 billion by 2022, driven by the growing incidence of lifestyle diseases and rising demand for affordable healthcare delivery systems. One of the reasons for the growing healthcare sector is the growing franchising model.

Franchise model and the healthcare industry do not gel up well with each other but in today’s time, the health market is one of the rapidly growing sectors on the franchising model. Brands like Apollo Hospitals Group which is rapidly emerging as India's largest healthcare chain, Dr Lal Path Labs, Dr. Reddy’s and various other reputed players of the health industry.

The franchise in the healthcare industry includes emergency walk-in clinics, assisted living facilities, telecare services emergency walk-in clinics, assisted living facilities, telecare services, massage therapy, patient mobility equipment, medical supplies, durable medical equipment and medical billing services. Franchise helps the healthcare industry in various like: cost reduction, doorstep services, and expansion of services. The increased use of technology in the healthcare industry enables providers to obtain signs and diagnostic information from patients and their home, without being there. This strengthens the growing home care and other franchise sectors by providing more and more opportunities.

A franchise model benefits the best of two worlds. As the owner of an independent business, the brand is free to leverage the entrepreneurial capabilities and knowledge of the local market. All the knowledge and the expertise which is required to successfully run the business are ensured in the franchise work model. As a part of a large network, the franchise offers world-class service with fewer expenses.

The franchisees appreciate that the entrepreneurs stand with them in terms of quality care and establishing the brand and support the brand in the best possible way they can.

The scope for franchise model in the health sector in the middle and low-income counties was first highlighted by the research Koehlmoos et al. (2009), in which the review of the influence of franchising on access to and quality of health services in middle- and low-income countries was deeply studied. During the study, the experts intentionally restricted themselves to a search for high-level evidence and concluded that there was none. Nevertheless, the lower-level evidence gave strong indications of what franchising can effect, particularly when multiple lower-level studies find the same results.

While the model is bringing more and more services and technologies to the middle-income countries, it has been found that the model requires some sort of uniformity to achieve economies of scale and to build a strong brand name in counties like India. It has been studied that this will reduce professionals’ autonomy and decreases their work satisfaction or the quality of care for customized services. Also, the practice will curb the misuse of power that people often practice resisting the implementation of certain business format elements that are necessary to reach competitive advantage and efficiency but are not in the professionals’ interests.

The most interesting benefit of the regularization of the model is that it will help in controlling the quality of services provided by professionals and give the franchisor the much-needed satisfaction for the protection of the brand name.

Pankaj Kumar Singh

Guest Author The author is Managing Director Franchise Bouquet (A division of Jalsa Ventures).