Ajmal Saleem co-founded Treat at Home, a digital healthtech platform with the mission of bringing high-quality, reasonably priced healthcare to patients’ homes.He looks after innovation, product development, and various team cohesion activities. Aspects of work would include enhancing ideas for the app, he also responsible for internal portals based on customer feedback, assessing key statistical data, identifying new growth opportunities, partnerships, etc.
Outside, Ajmal loves to attend startup events, network and connect with people, read articles about market trends, learn how our product could create more impact, and go for a swim when time permits.
Below are highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Ajmal Saleem:
Describe your background and what did you do before you started/joined the company?
I co-founded Treat at Home in 2018, right after high school. At that time, I had great experiences, like part-time jobs at a hospital and pharmacies. Jokes apart, there was no hands-on experience working at or running a company. But fortunately, I had closely observed healthcare practices from a very young age. Since my father is a consulting doctor, I used to see patients walk in, take a slip, and wait for their turns. They’d sit worried about their complaints, but right after the consultation, everyone walks away with a happy smile. Same goes with seeing trauma cases brought in, dressings, and fluid administration. Healthcare just gave me the sense of solving a huge hurdle and making people get back to normal.
This prompted me to pursue Treat at Home and enroll in medical school the following year. It gave me this wonderful opportunity to develop a solution for the health sector while learning how healthcare works in and around the patient experience.
Tell us about the inception of the company. How did it all start?
Once I finished high school, the excitement of pursuing this idea kept me awake. When my co-founder asked, “When everything is delivered at home, why not healthcare?” we started looking for reasons. There were home healthcare pioneers at that time, but they were not making a huge impact like other sectors. Our brainstorming session kept us going till we reached that point, where “the traditional employment model” of companies was a barrier.
We started Treat at Home in 2018, and from inception until mid-2019, we completely studied the market for possible pitfalls. Simultaneously, we launched the beta version of our app and started enrolling healthcare providers. Until January 2020, when the pandemic began, our entire focus was on the supply side.
We witnessed a huge demand for medical services due to the ongoing situation, and when everyone was closing their doors, we started operations in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The initial idea was to develop an exclusive app based platform for higher scalability, but we realized that people needed to interact, particularly in the health sector. So, we pivot toward a call-based booking system with executives speaking the regional language.
“I took over as CEO in May 2020 and scaled Treat at Home to an active network of 850 healthcare professionals and 3000+ medical services at home in 2 years.”
What has made you successful? What do you value?
As an executive, I feel success is still at a distance, but we have made marked achievements with Treat at Home. Customer feedback is the most important value we measure, among others.How users feel about our product matters more than how we feel about it. This only comes if we launch our solution soon, and yes, the first version of our platform used to be a complete mess. As people started using it, we gathered a ton of feedback and improvised based on that. It’s also important to keep hustling and pivoting.
Which are the major services of the company and how do the company to get ahead in the competition? What value-added services does the company provide?
Treat at Home is a digital health technology platform that brings quality and cost-effective medical care to patients’ doorsteps. Our portfolio of services includes home doctor visits, specialist teleconsultations, in-home nursing, and caretaking. We also render value-added services like physical therapy, lab tests at home, medicine delivery, medical equipment, ambulance service, and hospital appointments. From the idea stage, we focused on key differentiators to stand out in the home health sector.
Treat at Home is the first healthcare app in India powered by live tracking that enables patients to receive real-time location updates from providers they receive services from. With our peer-to-peer app and hyperlocal network of providers like doctors, nurses, and therapists, we render services faster and at an affordable cost than our competitors. Through our aggregator model, we don’t employ anyone but connect existing professionals to patients in need of medical care. This makes us highly scalable and less dependent on infrastructure.
What are the most important aspects of a company’s culture? What principles do you believe in and how do you build this culture?
A strong company culture reflects in customer success, and aspects like inclusivity, fairness, and constructive criticism play a major role.
We believe that everyone’s opinion matters, and team members ranging in rank from an executive to the chief can contribute to our customer-first approach. Building this culture starts with our core team adapting these values and passing them on to the expanding team.
What is the significance of innovative ideas in the company?
Innovation drives our company. As a healthtech platform, we have developed and implemented various technological solutions like app-to-app voice calling to enhance the privacy of doctors, virtual prescriptions that patients can print on-demand, completion codes to ensure the proper closure of services, quality checklists for patients and providers to validate during a service, and much more.
Give us your opinion on; do organizations rely heavily on individual heroics or team processes?
The spotlight is on ‘the person’ but the ship sails on a backstage of team members and processes working continuously to keep afloat.
What are your responsibilities as the Chief Executive Officer of the company? What is the happiest part of your daily routine?
As the CEO, I look at key decisions, team coordination, statistics, innovation, product development, and enhancements. Scaling Treat at Home has been my dream, and I am happy to be a part of it every day.
What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?
As I’m young myself, I believe there’s more to learn, but I’ll share my thoughts and insights so far. First of all, when I started, I had two options. Either to attend college or to pursue Treatment at Home. We come across all these stories where entrepreneurs quit their universities and pursued their startup ideas. It’s cool, but not everyone can do that. In India, we have our own culture; our parents want us to finish a degree, and so on. But it doesn’t mean, we have to set the spark aside. We can keep on reading stuff, study the market, and try to, if possible, develop a prototype. So, wherever we are in life, the first step is to pursue our passion. The second is building the right team; only they can take our vision and product to new heights. The third is to keep pivoting; the problem we are solving is the most important, not the solution itself. So, be open to change and keep hustling.
