Medtalks' Nilesh Aggarwal explains how to get health advice online

Medtalks is a digital platform providing expert answers to patient queries from highly-qualified and reputed doctors across India. It is the initiative to simplify and spread medical awareness among the public. Nilesh Aggarwal, CEO of Medtalks, in an email interview with Zee Business Online talks about various aspects of online medical help.

How does Medtalks spread medical awareness among people?
Considering the vast geographical and demographical diversity of India, it is imperative that medical awareness is spread to all areas of the country. Medtalks achieves this objective with the help of latest technology. It is a comprehensive video platform catering to all stakeholders in the field of healthcare. For the doctors and associated healthcare practitioners like nurses, paramedics and other allied healthcare workers, Medtalks offers more than 200 different courses to choose and learn from. To spread awareness among the patients and the general public, we have more than 2000 videos on common health-related queries from the general public and the answers are given by some of the leading doctors in India.

Can patients speak to doctors live on your platform?
While we understand the potential of tele-medicine services, currently, Medtalks is not offering such an option. As of now, we are focusing on spreading awareness on healthcare and related topics, and diseases and empowering healthcare professionals. Hence, the videos that we have on offer are in the form of doctors’ responses to questions. Patients or general viewers can however comment and seek answers on our website and YouTube
channel videos.

How patients can connect to doctors and is it free?
Medtalks is focused on spreading awareness related to common healthcare concerns, and towards this end, we have made available videos that feature answers by some of the most renowned Indian doctors to more than 2000 questions. As of now, it is more of a one-sided communication with an option for information seekers to comment on these videos on YouTube.

Have you received any funding?
Medtalks is funded by the IJCP Group, which is a well-known healthcare communications company in India.

What are your turnover and expansion plans?  
Medtalks is catering to medical awareness and skill enhancement segment which has an incredible potential and demand in India. Despite being a recent entrant in the Indian
healthcare industry, Medtalks is already earning revenue to the tune of a few crores. We have so far made available over 2000 videos for patient education and our expansion plans include recording another 3000 patient videos in the next few months. We are also aware of the need to make information in vernacular languages available to the public in tier 2 and 3 cities. There is a great deal of misinformation, myths and ambiguity present among the non-metro and rural Indian public related to diseases since there is a severe shortage of qualified healthcare professionals. This is one of our target areas and we are striving to make video content available for the audiences in these places.

Further, Medtalks is also working on creating new courses for medical students and will launch them systematically in the near future.