Entrepreneur Lim Wai Mun expands the product offerings of Doctor Anywhere across Singapore and the region. As published on Tatler, 3 Jun 2024.
Dressed in a black hoodie over a matching T‑shirt, with whitewashed jeans and white sneakers, Lim Wai Mun looks every bit the tech entrepreneur. But the 42‑year‑old founder and chief executive officer of Doctor Anywhere (DA) would rather it be known as a tech‑enabled healthcare company—emphasis on “healthcare”—than just another one of Singapore’s many tech start‑ups.
DA started off as a telehealth company in 2017, at a time when consumers were just getting comfortable with speaking to medical professionals via online video consultations. While the business grew fairly quickly, it was the Covid‑19 pandemic that really changed everything for Lim and his business. “We knew that Covid was going to be a blessing for us, [as remote solutions to everyday interactions were increasingly necessary]. But at the same time, we were also worried that it was going to be a curse,” the entrepreneur tells us. “When the sectoral tailwind is so strong, what happens next? And with the expectations that were being put into our investors’ minds—‘You’re growing so well; why can’t you grow like this forever?’—we realised that maintaining such rapid growth would require a lot of careful planning and sustainable strategies.”
Above Lim Wai Mun on the cover of the June 2024 issue of Tatler Singapore.
So Lim looked at redefining the company’s focus. “We started as a tech company; we’re still one in so many ways. But do we want to go into pure tech? Or do we want to go into healthcare services? These are two very different things,” he says. “When it’s pure tech, it means that we’ll end up building software, be it for doctors or for insurers; it’s just B2B (business‑to‑business) as SaaS (software as a service). But when it’s [healthcare] services, it means that we’re the ones providing care. And that’s a completely different business model.”
Lim found the answer to which direction DA should grow within his team. “[The team members said], ‘We’re here to bring impact to the healthcare system. We’re bringing better care, which is personalised and accessible, and we feel passionate about this mission.’ I realised then that we were already evolving into a healthcare company,” he says. “But if that was the direction, it had to be both online and offline—and integrated with primary, secondary, tertiary and step‑down care, as well as wellness [with preventive care and intervention].”
After working with his team to develop a comprehensive integrated healthcare model, Lim started putting together the pieces of the puzzle. The most visible recent and significant milestone is the launch of DA Orchard MedSuites, a flagship integrated health screening and imaging centre that opened in February this year.
Located just off Orchard Road, the 12,000-square-foot facility prioritises preventive health and wellness, offering comprehensive health screenings and radiological examinations such as X‑rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and computed tomography (CT) scans in a single location.
“We’re focused on building services around our users, in all cycles of what we call the healthcare continuum: primary care when you fall sick; secondary care when you need to see a specialist; tertiary care when you need surgery; step‑down care when you recuperate; and then you go back to wellness,” Lim expounds. “This facility ensures that we all have a good understanding of our own health.”
With a dedicated health concierge service, one‑to‑one consultations with healthcare professionals and in‑depth health reports, DA Orchard MedSuites offers personalised care and an astute focus on experience, which starts from the moment the lift doors open onto the space on the fifth floor of Como Orchard. “We hope to capture three things: that it looks good, smells good and sounds good—it’s very much experiential,” says Lim.
There are 17 private pods and three VIP suites within a quiet environment designed for optimal comfort and privacy. As an extension to its holistic approach, DA Orchard MedSuites also offers education and empowerment through food and nutrition masterclasses as well as community health initiatives aimed at fostering overall well‑being. “We aim to empower individuals to proactively manage their health through early detection and preventive measures against critical and chronic illnesses,” Lim explains.
With its tech‑enabled, omnichannel approach, patients can access DA’s healthcare services through various platforms, from its telehealth app to in‑person consultations at its clinics—there are currently nine DA Clinics islandwide, as well as two in-house clinics at the United World College—or at home through DA’s mobile medical team.
In 2022, DA acquired the Catalist‑listed Asian Healthcare Specialists, a group of 14 medical specialists with a patient‑first approach and a goal of making specialised care accessible to all. Spanning multidisciplinary specialities, including orthopaedics, ophthalmology, gastroenterology and otorhinolaryngology, its clinics complement DA’s healthcare services and offer patients greater access to complex treatments.
This is aligned with DA’s broader vision to build what Lim calls “a hospital without beds”. He explains: “We have all the basic features of a hospital, but at the same time, we don’t need to depend on capacity. The biggest issue for hospitals today is that they’re limited by building size. We have a much bigger vision to decentralise healthcare to ease the strain on the system.”
With Singapore’s ageing population and the rise of chronic illnesses, healthcare costs are projected to triple to $27 billion by 2030. “We want to target simple elective surgeries first. For example, if you had an eye surgery, you can go home to rest, and we’ll follow up with a home visit.” Since its launch, DA has grown to become a regional healthcare provider, with localised operations in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, delivering holistic healthcare to more than 2.5 million users across Southeast Asia.
TECH IN HEALTHCARE
For all his contributions to healthcare, Lim is not a doctor. He is trained in mechanical engineering, which he tells us helps him to “think logically and be more systematic”. This mindset has long appealed to recruiters in the finance sector, which led him into his first career, in finance and investments at Standard Chartered Private Equity and Temasek Holdings. These roles further prepared him to become an entrepreneur, helping him “think from a risk‑reward perspective”, which has influenced his decision‑making throughout his DA journey.
Above Lim wears a turtleneck, trousers and shoes from Louis Vuitton; Tambour automatic 40 mm watch in steel with a blue dial
But it was his volunteer work that sparked his current career. He was doing charity work as part of his previous company’s corporate social responsibility efforts, distributing meal boxes in some of the poorer estates in Singapore, when he saw a clear gap in primary healthcare; many people, he observed, simply could not leave their homes to see a doctor. “I thought about how I could help improve the situation and one thing led to another,” Lim says. When his first idea—an app through which the elderly can press a button to alert doctors, who would then make house calls for free—did not pan out, he began researching telemedicine, which was then already growing in the US, the UK and even China. He invested $150,000 from his own savings to develop DA.
Today, the company is backed by investors including Asia Partners, EDBI, IHH Healthcare, Kamet Capital and Pavilion Capital. Last December, DA announced that it secured US$40.8 million in a Series C1 extension round, from investors including Square Peg and Novo Holdings. The additional capital injection will help accelerate its next‑generation healthcare innovation and strengthen its presence in secondary care.
Above Lim wears a jacket and jumper from Louis Vuitton; Tambour automatic 40 mm watch in steel
This brings the company’s total investments since inception to more than US$180 million. “If you want to build a sustainable healthcare company, it’s difficult to survive on a stand‑alone basis, in just one care segment,” Lim says. “While it’s not impossible, you need to participate in the entire healthcare continuum, which also means that, many a time, you’re no longer an SME (small and medium enterprise), but a much bigger company. It goes beyond trying to address just one subset of healthcare; it’s redefining the entire healthcare experience.”
To do this, “tech can really make a difference”, Lim says. “It’s the only way to enable scalability and efficiency, and it brings consistency and reliability. Healthcare is an extremely labour‑intensive sector and the biggest opportunity is building a strong tech backbone to enable it. Without the tech enablement, it’ll be unsustainable.” DA’s significant growth is testament to its use of tech. It ranked 11th on the Singapore’s Fastest‑Growing Companies 2024 list compiled by The Straits Times and Statista, and fifth in the Financial Times and Statista’s High‑Growth Companies Asia‑Pacific 2023 list.
Meanwhile, Lim was named the Ernst & Young (EY) Entrepreneur of the Year in the Health Care Services category in 2022 and subsequently, the overall winner as EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2022 Singapore.
Lim takes pride in the team he has built over the years. “We’ve had people who gave up their jobs, or rejected roles, at some of the big tech companies to join us. I feel proud that a candidate even feels that we are on a par with such huge global companies,” he says. “I want to be able to decentralise decision‑making, and ensure that our talents can continue to build even better products and business. That’s when I think we’ll truly be a sustainable company for the long‑term. There’ll come a day when we could [pursue an] IPO or get acquired—and it should happen this way—but that’s really not my focus now. I want to build a sustainable company that can survive and prosper for a long time—and that’s what I’m trying to get to.”
Even when it comes to his own health, Lim is big on sustainability—and doing what suits him. His rules for keeping healthy are simple: “eating well, sleeping well, exercising and enjoying what you’re doing”. He spends his weekends “gunning for my best 5‑kilometre timing”, running from his home to Robertson Quay and then around the Marina Barrage, before another 5 kilometres back home. “And this,” he shares, “is when some of my most brilliant ideas come about.”
