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Interview: Ranjan Singh, CEO and Co-founder, HealthHero

HealthHero is the largest telehealth provider in Europe. In the few years since being founded in 2019, it has managed to consistently grow its revenue at over 30% per annum and achieve a dominant position in four key European markets — the UK, France, Germany and Ireland, in a period when many other players trying to scale in this space have gone bust.

It now delivers over four million online consultations per year, most of which are GP consultations, making it Europe’s largest private primary care provider as well its largest telehealth provider, and generates well over €100 million in annual revenue. It has also managed to become profitable, proving that standalone telehealth is a workable business model.

Ranjan Singh, HealthHero’s CEO and Co-founder, explained in a conversation with HBI what the company does differently.

“We’ve always been quite bullish on the healthcare sector,” Singh says. “Healthcare needs to evolve and adopt more efficient ways of doing things. The current system is unsustainable. There aren’t enough doctors or money to meet the growing demand.

“There are two big hurdles that those wishing to innovate in healthcare face, however. The first is that there is resistance from patients and practitioners to adopting new ways of doing things. Any new tech that’s introduced has to be simple enough that they can get their heads around it. The second big hurdle is that in Europe the healthcare user is generally not the one who is paying. You need to figure out a reimbursement mechanism.”

Singh says that these two challenges are the reason HealthHero decided to begin with a focus on episodic primary care.

More recently the company has expanded beyond primary care, adding specialists across about 30 specialisms, including mental health, weight management and dermatology. “The foundational pillars of what we’re doing are focused on providing superior experience for patients, whilst also supercharging efficiency for the system, in terms of clinical capacity, and using less doctors and money. These pillars apply in specialist healthcare, as well as in primary care.”

The platform is being gradually built out into what Singh refers to as a ‘digital clinic’, covering a full digital pathway that includes online content for patients, the ability to fill prescriptions, and get diagnostics. They’ve also added a software symptom checker, which Singh says is “head and shoulders” above any other in the market, and digital health risk assessment tools.

“We’re adding more features to improve the patient experience, and using more AI and more asynchronous pathways to make it more efficient. We’ve also introduced self-pay on the payment side,” Singh says.

Ultimately the aim is to build an “AI-first digital health system”. When asked what this involves exactly, Singh says:

“We’re doing much more on the experience side, to make it preventive, and then predictive. We want to be able to offer the best payment option and the best pathway for the patient. We are strong believers in the idea that the next generation healthcare should be a balance between public and private partnerships. And we at HealthHero are perfectly positioned to work in partnership with health systems.”

Whilst in the UK HealthHero’s platform is only available to those paying privately, in France and Germany the company receives statutory insurance reimbursement. “Anyone in France can use HealthHero via statutory insurance, and we have an industrialised payment processing system (some of our competitors have to send invoices to the insurer).”

When asked whether being able to do preventive care will require access to patients’ long term healthcare records, Singh says this will help, although it is not a prerequisite.

“We do have a lot of our own datasets for patients, but these are for episodic care. When you marry this data with the long-term patient records, and do analysis using AI on it upfront, this will make us well placed to provide that preventive/predictive healthcare.” Singh says this is not something the company has begun actively working on, but it is an important part of the vision going forward.

HealthHero has made progress in getting access to patients’ records: “In the UK we’re now able to pull up patients’ NHS records; in France we’re a bit behind, but France is launching a centralised patient record system which we will be able to read and write into as well; the German system is more complex, but we are one of the only digital healthcare companies that is being integrated into the new Gematik system; in Ireland we’re already fully integrated into the national record system.”

Singh tells us that the company has no plans to expand into physical healthcare, as this would make it a “very different business model”, and one which is much less scaleable.

Part of the reason for this, Singh explains, is that HealthHero does not believe that digital healthcare services are only valuable when fully integrated with physical service provision, as some others do.

“Some people have the idea that to make digital health work you need to become a physi-digital provider. We’ve decided instead to go deeper into the purely digital side. We’ve gone more into condition management with a virtual clinic. Whilst there are some physical touch points, we don’t need to own physical infrastructure. We can partner with pharmacies, or health kiosks in certain places. We believe an asset-light infrastructure can deliver the same benefit.”

But another factor is that there is enough room to grow within the telehealth space.

“For primary care, we believe that 75–80% consultations can be delivered perfectly well remotely. Right now the penetration is only 5% across Europe. I think maximum penetration could maybe be 30%. Then there’s a lot you can do with chronic care management, which provides another avenue for further growth.”

Singh says HealthHero is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity, because it has managed to marry digital innovation with solid healthcare credentials in a way that many other digital healthcare companies have not.

“What really makes us unique is how we’ve managed to combine being a high quality healthcare provider with being a digital tech innovator. We are a healthcare provider, not just a tech platform. We use tech to deliver it, but we’re responsible for the healthcare as well. There are many companies pushing the boundaries of digital but who aren’t credible healthcare providers, and vice versa. We have that combination.”

Ranjan Singh will be speaking at HBI’s next conference in Paris, March 23-25, 2026. To see who else will be speaking click here.

We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Martin De Benito Gellner or call 0207 183 3779.