Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and backed by the Government’s push for the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) platform, Eka Care reports having digitised over 110 million health records and serving more than 50 million users on its platform.
Vikalp Sahni, technologist and founder of the company, says 2021 proved to be an ideal time to launch, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought health and wellbeing to the forefront. “At that time, CoWIN was a widely used platform for vaccinations, and the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) was just getting underway. This allowed us to build our platform to be ABDM-native,” explains Sahni, CEO of Eka Care.
He adds that several factors during the pandemic drove wider adoption of electronic records—ranging from COVID medical records and vaccination certificates to the creation of ABHA IDs by both doctors and patients.
“While platforms like CoWIN, ABDM, and other large-scale population initiatives helped us acquire a significant user base, our electronic medical record (EMR) tool has attracted strong interest because India was also seeking a modern, digital medical record system for deployment in doctors’ clinics. Our primary focus has always been on medical records. In contrast, players like Practo excel in demand generation, managing doctor appointments, while companies such as 1MG and PharmEasy operate on a larger scale but are more transaction-driven, focusing on pharmacy and lab services,” he explains.
While transactional aspects of healthcare—such as appointments and online pharmacies—are largely well-served, Sahni points out that the clinical side, especially longitudinal, non-transactional data, remains a significant challenge. Eka’s software is designed to tackle this by simplifying the digital documentation of clinical information for doctors, a step he says is vital for generating insights and ensuring interoperability.
Sahni highlights the strong synergy with ABHA, noting the company’s achievement of creating 17 million accounts in a short period. “These are still the early days for ABHA, but we believe in its potential. It’s very similar to UPI in its 2014–2015 launch phase. We’ve seen three types of users adopting ABHA. First are the alpha users—those eager to try new technologies. Second, the government now requires ABHA as the entry point for booking appointments at government hospitals. In this case, ABHA offers conveniences such as appointment booking by simply scanning a QR code, and many of our 17 million users have used our app to schedule appointments at these hospitals,” he explains.
Sahni described the company as a “health AI platform,” building specialised AI models—called “parrotlet”—for medical document analysis, voice recognition, reasoning, and text interpretation. Integrated directly into the app, these models help patients extract meaningful insights from their health reports, while enabling doctors to record consultations efficiently through an AI-powered ‘scribe’ tool that eliminates the need for manual typing.
“When you download the app, sync your Gmail, or upload a record, we transform that data into meaningful health insights, allowing you to track trends across multiple reports,” says Sahni. “We’re far more than just a file storage tool. Today, doctors use our Eka Scribe platform to document consultations entirely without typing.”
Explaining the process, Sahni says the technology functions like an ambient AI, listening to conversations between doctor and patient and converting them into a medical document. It can interpret English as well as a mix of English and regional languages like Hindi. The AI captures vital signs, symptoms, medical history, and medication details directly into the EMR pad, and can also produce a PDF prescription.
Riding on strong adoption, Sahni says the company’s financial goal, as a four-year-old pure tech organisation, is to grow its paid doctor base from 12,000 to 35,000–40,000 by the end of the year. It also aims to scale the use of its developer APIs—currently leveraged by over 160 developers and enterprises—under a pay-per-use model for services like Scribe. “We want more developers and enterprises to integrate with us. These APIs work on a pay-per-use basis—for example, with Scribe, we charge a fixed rate per minute of uploaded data. And because our model is India-centric, the output quality is better than what you’d get from OpenAI or other non-Indian LLMs,” Sahni explains.
