Biography
Arshad Ameer is the co-founder of Flash Health, a startup that provides at-home medicine delivery and diagnostic services in Sri Lanka. Flash Health has over 40,000 users, with 32,000+ medicine deliveries completed. Over the past 12 months, Flash Health made 157M Sri Lankan rupees (~$518K USD) in revenue.
Before building Flash Health, Arshad led the program and delivery for Telenor Health, a digital platform providing online doctor consultations and health intermediary services in Bangladesh.
You’ve worked on several projects in the healthcare space. Which specific experience influenced your decision to start Flash Health?
I worked on Tonic, a Bangladeshi digital healthcare platform. It was funded by Telenor, a telco operator that owns Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s leading telco. Telenor wanted to build a digital healthcare platform, but there was no playbook for doing so. We knew healthcare awareness was low, and that the doctor-to-population ratio was far below the WHO’s recommendation.
Source: World Health Organisation
We built a digital care platform that included a doctor-staffed call center, medicine delivery partners, hospital partners for lab services, and a micro-insurance product. Over four years, we tested multiple products to find what worked.
At the time, literacy levels in Bangladesh were low. Selling small, prepaid bundles of digital healthcare services, such as online doctor consultations, discounts on medicines, and basic insurance, to a user base where only two in ten people could read required deep behavioral experimentation.
I split my time between Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Each time I returned home, I helped my parents with their medicines and appointments. I noticed the exact same healthcare gaps in Sri Lanka than the ones we solved in Bangladesh. That realization, combined with what I learned at Tonic, laid the foundations for Flash Health.
Before Flash Health, how were Sri Lankans typically buying medicines and getting diagnostic tests?