Built from a memory that never left.

I was in my 12th standard when my grandmother was dying of breast cancer. Stage four. She was bedridden at home. There was a doctor in our neighbourhood — a man in his early forties — who would stop by whenever my mother called him, fitting the visit into his morning walk. No appointment. No clinic. Just a neighbour who happened to be a doctor, and who understood that some patients cannot come to you.

He came two or three times as her condition worsened. He sat with her. He talked with us. When she finally passed, he came to confirm her death. But the system did not recognise what he had done. He could not issue the death certificate — because there was no formal record, no official framework, for the care he had quietly provided. The care was real. The relationship was real. The system simply had no place for it.

That stayed with me.

I went to Bangalore Medical College and graduated MBBS in 2018. Then COVID arrived. During the first wave, before I had built anything, I was already doing informal home visits — going to patients who were too afraid or too unwell to step outside. There was no platform, no booking system. Just me and a prescription pad.

In 2021, I started JanaVaidya — from a small 1BHK flat in Bengaluru. I was the entire operation. I took the bookings, I drove myself to visits, I wrote the prescriptions, I managed the accounts. If a patient called at an odd hour, I answered. I did it that way for a long time, and I am glad I did — because I now know exactly what a doctor doing home visits needs, and what makes it hard.

Since the day I started, I have personally done more than 1,000 home visits. Most of them are not logged on any platform — the record is a prescription slip in someone's home, or an entry in a family's memory. That taught me something too: care that is not documented does not compound. It does not protect the patient, and it does not protect the doctor.

In 2021, alongside starting JanaVaidya, I completed a course in social entrepreneurship from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. In 2022, I joined an MD residency in Community Medicine at Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital in Mumbai — that expanded how I think about systems, public health, and how technology can reach people that individual effort cannot. In 2024, I completed a postgraduate diploma in medical law and ethics from the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru. Each of these filled a gap I had felt on the ground: how do you build something that works not just for one doctor, but for thousands? And how do you do it in a way that is legally sound?

Meanwhile, JanaVaidya kept growing. Over 50 doctors have worked on the platform across different periods. More than 6,000 patients have been seen. We have a 4.9-star rating on Google. Videos of our service went viral on WhatsApp — some of them three or four years old and still circulating. We receive messages of support from across Bengaluru, from across Karnataka, from people in other states who are simply asking when we are coming to their city.

I started this alone, driving myself to visits in a city I was still learning. If I could build it from a 1BHK with no team, no funding, and no template to follow, then any doctor — with the right training and the right support — can do this better than I did. That is the entire premise of what we are building next.

What JanaVaidya is trying to do

The problem was never that doctors did not want to do home visits. The problem was that no proper system existed for them to do it well — with the right records, the right legal footing, the right support. A doctor who wants to add home visits to their practice should not have to figure all of that out alone.

JanaVaidya is being built to change that. We want to make it straightforward for any verified doctor — in any city, town, or village across India — to integrate home visits into their practice and serve their own community. We want every patient who books through us to see the doctor's actual qualification, their specialisation, and their council registration before the visit. No hidden credentials. No ambiguity about who is coming to your home.

The longer ambition: to train at least 10,000 doctors in home visit practice by 2030. To make this a recognised, respected, legally sound part of Indian healthcare — not an informal arrangement that disappears when the neighbourhood doctor moves away.

What that doctor did for my grandmother deserves a proper home in the healthcare system. That is what we are building.

Dr. Abheet B Shetty
MBBS · MD (Community Medicine) · PGMLE, NLSIU Bangalore
Founder, JanaVaidya
Amrutha Carings Private Limited · Karnataka