Ziqitza Healthcare Ltd is an ambulance service provider in India that was invested in by Acumen over five years ago. It has since grown from 9 ambulances in Mumbai to over 1,000 ambulances serving 2.5 million callers across 5 states. While it has an "Access for All" mission, Ziqitza's CEO wanted better data on who they were actually serving and whether they were reaching the poorest segments as intended. This case study will walk through how Ziqitza used a Lean Data approach to gather new customer insights without disrupting operations or hiring external surveyors.

1. ACUMEN LEAN DATA
CASE STUDY
AMBULANCE SERVICES
FOR THE POOR
A Case Study of Ziqitza Healthcare Ltd. In India

2. Throughout this course, we’ll walk
you through the example of Ziqtza
Healthcare Ltd, an Acumen investee
that is providing ambulance services
in India. In early 2014, Ziqitza
successfully implemented a Lean Data
project to gather new insights about
their customers.
Learn more about Ziqtiza here:
http://acumen.org/investment/zhl/
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3. PART 1
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4. The brightly-lit room in Amritsar,
Punjab buzzes with life. A few dozen
young people sit in front of phones and
computers. Their phones ring every few
seconds and pending calls flash on their
computer screens. Fingers run quickly
and lightly across keyboards, punching
in numbers and commands
instinctively.
But this isn’t just any call center in India – the
young employees are answering calls that are
often a matter of life and death. They’re
working for Ziqitza Healthcare Limited, which
runs 240 ambulances for the government of
Punjab in addition to several hundred
ambulances across several other states. The call
center processes almost a thousand calls a day
from traffic accidents to expectant mothers
headed into labor.
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5. Watch this short video to learn about Ziqtza and glimpse the problems it tackles on the
streets of India every day. Click on the link below to the launch the video.
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6. Acumen invested in Ziqitza more than
five years ago, when the company had a
fleet of just nine ambulances in Mumbai
and a can-do spirit. Through a number
of public-private partnerships with state
governments the company has since
grown to serve more than 2.5 million
callers with a fleet of nearly a thousand
ambulances.
Ziqitza’s emergency medical technicians are very
reliable. They were first responders in the 11/28
attacks at the Taj hotel in Mumbai, and they
played a major role helping victims of the
flooding in Orissa in 2014. Acumen has always
known Ziqitza to be a socially-focused company
with cutting-edge standards of service. Their
CEO, Sweta Mangal, knew that, from an impact
perspective, success would mean providing
ambulance services to the poorest of the poor
and upholding the company’s “Access for All”
motto.
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7. However, they did not yet have robust hard data on who
they were serving and whether they were reaching as far in
to poorer segments of the population as they intended.
Given the company’s social mission, Sweta was determined
to better understand these questions: she knew Ziqitza
received 3 million calls a year, deployed 1250 ambulances
across 5 states in India and had an access for all model, but
she didn’t reliably know where and how they were serving
the poorest segments of the population. They had a lot of
great anecdotes, but they didn’t have the data to answer
questions like:
• Had its services been excluding those with the fewest
alternatives?
• Were its marketing campaigns succeeding in spreading
the message of universal service?
• In emergencies, like the rush to hospital for childbirth,
were the very poorest of expectant mothers actually
using Ziqitza’s service?
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8. By the end of this course, you’ll learn the answers to these
questions. But, more importantly, you’ll learn how Ziqitza
gathered the data to answer these questions without
disrupting normal company operations or hiring external
surveyors. They found that a Lean Data approach—like the
one we’ll walk you through in this course—yielded the key
insights the needed to enhance how they create value for
customers.
Move on to the
reading!
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