Our official objectives are to design, establish and run the following:
- Advocacy for equitable and affordable medical care
- Patient Counselling on medical negligence and quality of services
- Establishing Clinics, hospitals and diagnostic centres
- Patient Transport service
- Pharmacy, Optical and similar services
- Home-based Medical Care
- Scheme to help reduce out-of-pocket medical expenses of the participant members
- Instil in the members the spirit and practice of thrift, self- and mutual-help
- Welfare activities for the promotion of morals, education and health of the members
- All other activities as are incidental or conducive to the attainment of all of the above
Our income comes from our beneficiary membership which is our long-term strategic capital.
Today we are leveraging 10,000+ beneficiaries’ combined strength to negotiate better rates from private medical care providers. We have more than 50 private medical providers, including New Delhi and Hyderbad, who have partnered with us to offer our members significant rebates on their bills. Collected samples, dada, when extrapolated, show that our members reaped several crores rupees of benefits in the form of rebates that they availed from the private providers who tied up with us.
At the same time, the growing membership provides us with the operating cost of the society. Our membership fee currently is only Rs. 500/-, which is lifelong. So we are not making any profit but have been able to balance the book without significant liability.
The membership strength is the plank for planning our medical care services, including ethical marketing of healthcare goods and services and earning a decent profit. However, profit is not our shareholders’ motive; currently, we have 265 shareholders.
We are planning a model 100-bedded hospital in Guwahati to offer routine services, including maternity and child health and elderly care, which will operate on innovative service provisions to cut the cost of common elective surgeries, e.g., by consolidating cases and providing economy of the scale. We will leverage the services of philanthropic specialist doctors from home and abroad. The hospital will serve as a replicable model for other citizen initiatives.