Indonesia's PesanLab connects consumers to medical labs

By Masyitha Baziad August 25, 2016

Wants to digitise the private medical laboratories industry
Currently has nine labs on board, offering 500 packages

Indonesia's PesanLab connects consumers to medical labs

INDONESIAN startup PT Mitra Digital Laboratorindo (PesanLab) aims to fill a gap in the nation’s digital healthcare ecosystem by digitising diagnostic laboratory services.

Healthcare startups such as Konsula, HaloDok, DoctorGratis and ApotikAntar are focusing on online directories, consultation, and e-commerce – leaving a niche for PesanLab to fill.

“When people consult doctors through an online platform, the next step will be to go to a medical laboratory for tests, and we want to facilitate this process,” PesanLab founder and chief executive officer Dimas Prasetyo tells Digital News Asia (DNA).

“Our platform is basically an e-commerce site for diagnostic laboratories. Patients can select a medical check-up package, choose an operator, place an order through PesanLab, and go straight to the lab,” he adds.

In Indonesia, patients would normally need to see a doctor, obtain a recommendation letter, go to the lab, wait for the results, and then go back to the doctor.

PesanLab wants to simplify this process with the help of other healthcare startups. Online consultations are already possible and now, medical check-ups can also be organised without going to a hospital.

“If the results show that further treatment is needed, patients can then go to the hospital. We can at least eliminate the first process that takes a lot of time,” says Dimas.

The platform has partnered with nine laboratories across Jakarta and West Java to offer 500 medical test packages. It will add three more big brands before the end of the year, according to Dimas.

“We have served 100 individual patients so far and sold packages priced between Rp350,000 and Rp3.5 million (US$26.40 and US$264),” he adds.

PesanLab will add hospitals to its platform next year to meet diagnostic needs on weekends and holidays.

“We will start expanding our platform to more big cities including Surabaya, Medan, Bali, and Makassar. In two or three years, our platform will be available across Indonesia,” Dimas declares.

PesanLab secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from an undisclosed source in January. The company is targeting to secure a pre-Series A round in the next few months.

It startup is currently developing a back-end dashboard technology that would allow the laboratory process to be tracked.

The challenges

Indonesia's PesanLab connects consumers to medical labs According to Dimas (pic), about 70% of healthcare processes depend on medical diagnostics.

Dimas, who has a degree in medical technology and laboratory science, was working with a major medical laboratory when he realised that digitisation was needed to help the industry reach more people. He then decided to design his own platform.

“The medical diagnostics industry is cloistered. You rarely find price tags and complete product descriptions if you are not at their branch.

“We want to slowly open up the industry so more people have access to services, and operators get more customers,” he says.

It was certainly not smooth sailing when Dimas tried to explain the concept behind PesanLab to the major laboratories.

“The majority of the laboratories were not willing to be featured on an e-commerce site with price tags as the main selling point.

“They argued that each laboratory has different methods, equipment and levels of diagnostics, therefore the price gap is high; sometimes more than double for the same test,” he says.

To address this concern, PesanLab does not list check-ups according to price but in alphabetical order instead.

From B2B to B2C

Dimas initially started LabConX in 2014. This was a business-to-business (B2B) platform for laboratories to gather and analyse data from all medical check test results around Indonesia.

Ultimately, the idea was for LabConX to manage all medical test results and leverage on big data analytics to produce a health report on Indonesia.

“The idea was not really realistic at that time since the health industry is highly regulated and patient data are very sensitive,” Dimas admits.

He and his team then decided to rebrand LabConX to PesanLab in 2015, changing their approach to serve the basic needs of individual customers first.

PesanLab serves three customer groups: Individual patients, corporate patients, and the diagnostics laboratories.

In future, it will also engage with corporations to get them to organise employee medical tests through its platform.

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