Success Story: Left job to take care of parents, did TPA business, now portfolio worth Rs 3000 crore
The person being talked about above is mechanical engineer Girish Rao. He started Vidal Health in Bengaluru in 2002. Vidal Health provides Third Party Administration (TPA) services in the healthcare space. Shankar Bali, a telecom and fintech professional, joined them as joint managing director. According to the news published in Your Story, today Vidal Health manages a premium portfolio of Rs 3000 crore.
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Girish started a business to help non-resident Indians (NRIs) with healthcare services for their aging parents living in India. He says, “NRIs living in the US had problems taking care of their parents living back home (India). They could not travel between the two countries frequently. At that time, Jeff Bezos was championing the internet. Inspired by him, I launched a service portal for NRIs and their parents.” Girish tried many models to create NRI database. These range from working with banks to acquiring a company that used to physically post emails from NRIs to their elderly parents without internet access.
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Girish’s business did not take off and between 2000-2002, Girish lost the funds he had invested. Despite this, however, he realized that the network of hospitals he had built in major Indian cities could be useful when the government was opening up health insurance to the private sector. He says, “In 2001, there was a white paper describing how private organizations could exist in this space. Looking at the document, I felt I had already built a network to build such an organization. In 2002, I applied and got the license.”
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Liberalization and increasing popularity of internet increased business
Liberalization of the insurance sector in India in the late 90s and the increasing popularity of the Internet gave impetus to Girish Rao’s entrepreneurial journey. Aiming to challenge the status quo and solve complex problems, Girish tells Your Story, “At that time, the Indian insurance sector was opened up to private organizations. I got the license and started Vidal Health with the mission of providing quality TPA services to health insurance policyholders in India and abroad.
Vidal works at more than 800 locations
Currently, Vidal – one of India’s top healthcare management companies – operates across more than 800 locations in India and partners with more than 10,000 service providers, including hospitals, diagnostics labs and physicians. Girish claims that Vidal settles more than 10 lakh claims and eight lakh pre-authorization requests every year. It even handles a premium portfolio of Rs 3,000 crore in health insurance. However, for Girish, the failure of his first venture sowed the seeds of founding Vidal Health.
