CoVID-19 rendered 2020 the most wretched years for most of the living mankind. Human lives have been lost, businesses continue to suffer never seen before pressure and governments are buckling under fiscal pressure.
At HealthAssure, we were in a relatively decent position. Ofcourse as a Series A company, the financial pressure was felt. Salaries were trimmed. The morale was low. But work and hustle did not suffer. WFH was not too difficult a transition.
The Tele-Consultation business was picking up. Walk-Ins were plummeting. And rightly so. Then the Indian Government came out with RT-PCR guidelines. It allowed both government and private diagnostic centers to conduct RT-PCR tests for users with a GP prescription for the same. The price ceiling was decided by the government.
It was all about putting in a mechanism to allow for convenient booking at an accredited diagnostic center of choice. There was one other thing. Since Health is a State Subject in India (meaning different states can make different rules for the same thing), different states had different rules for the prescription. Some mandated a physical GP prescription while some allowed for digital ones. Also, getting fake or outdated ones could attract penalties. With all this in the eye-line, we got to work.
This problem was validated when our Sales team put us on call with potential B2B clients who wished to have this feature for their customers. They categorically were concerned about misinformation. Also, few of our B2C users had been reaching out for a prescription while we rolled out the lab test booking and they were not sure if a digital one would do. Nobody wanted to get out of their homes during lockdown.
Since it was not truly a new product (as in HealthAssure already had an appointment booking journey for consultations and diagnostic tests), it reduced the "coming up to speeds" time. We decided to work on two fronts.
1) Work with the supply side teams to getting new centers onboarded (those not already onboarded otherwise)
2) Procure their SOPs which could be displayed and communicated to the user
3**) Get the backend sorted - New Product ID, DB mapping of price-existing centers**
I quickly drew a scope document (it was planned not to go in for a PRD as speed was of the essence and in reality it wasn't a new product). The scope included:
1) Product Information (variants, pricing, T&Cs)
2) Linkage to GP consultation
3) User Journey
4) Support Wireframes
5) Impact Grid
The document was sent across to different stakeholders - Business Team, Tech Head and the CRM team. There was special emphasis on quick turnaround. We closed out our inputs, queries and the subsequent responses to them within 2 days.
The context shifted towards getting the: