As employers confront rising burnout, low engagement with preventive care, and generational divides in health behaviour, ekincare is leveraging AI, personalization, and integrated services to reshape corporate healthcare delivery in India. Kiran Kalakuntla, Co-founder and CEO, ekincare outlines how the company is transitioning organizations from transactional benefits to data-driven, continuous care—driving outcomes that align workforce wellbeing with business performance.
Why do you think nearly 60% of Indian employees still skip their annual checkups, even when employers offer them? What does that signal the state of corporate healthcare today?
Annual health checkups often take a backseat not because people don’t care about their health, but because life gets in the way. Long work hours, tight deadlines, and the assumption of “I’m fine” may lead many to push routine checkups down their priority list. So, when nearly 60% of employees skip these exams even when they’re employer-sponsored, it’s not just about convenience; it reflects a deeper behavioral and cultural inertia. It signals that corporate healthcare today is still viewed as transactional rather than integral. To shift this, organizations need to move beyond offering benefits and focus on creating a culture where preventive care is normalized, accessible, and actively encouraged.
According to your Wellbeing Index, women are three times more likely to seek mental health support than men, despite being underrepresented in the workforce. What does this say about accessibility and stigma in workplace mental health?
While more organizations are prioritizing employee wellbeing today, the data reveals an interesting insight that woman, though fewer in number at the workplace, are three times more likely to seek mental health support than men. This highlights how awareness and openness to seeking help still vary across demographics. It’s not just about availability of services, but also about how mental health is perceived and discussed at work. Encouragingly, the growing usage among women signals that the stigma is beginning to lift. The next step is to ensure the same level of comfort and accessibility reaches everyone, across roles and genders. As mental health becomes a bigger part of workplace conversations, the focus must shift toward building a culture where seeking support is seen as strength, not vulnerability.
ekincare serves over 500 enterprises including Capgemini, GSK, Blackrock, and KPMG. What common challenges do these employers face when moving from reactive health benefits to a preventive care model?
Lack of awareness and inconsistent engagement are two of the biggest challenges that prevent employees from shifting from a reactive to a preventive healthcare model.
At ekincare, we’ve addressed this by leveraging AI-driven, persona-based communication—personalized for each individual based on their unique phase in the wellness journey.
This targeted and intelligent engagement strategy has enabled us to achieve industry-best user engagement and the highest monthly active user rates, setting a new benchmark for preventive care adoption in the workplace.
How is AI helping to reframe employee health from a cost centre to a performance and productivity enabler? Can you share any metrics or case studies on ROI?
Traditionally, employee health has been treated as a cost line item, something to manage, not optimize. But AI is flipping through that narrative. By analyzing real-time health data, usage patterns, and risk markers, AI is helping organizations proactively identify issues before they escalate, enabling timely interventions. This shift from treatment to prevention is where the real value lies. When employees stay healthier, they show up more consistently, engage better, and perform stronger. AI also brings precision to wellbeing strategies, making them less generic and more personalized. That’s what turns health from an expense into an investment to drive workforce productivity.
Gen Z is leading mental health engagement, while older employees show hesitance. How is ekincare designing experiences that address such generational divides in usage and trust?
Different generations engage with mental health very differently. What feels natural to Gen Z may feel unfamiliar or even uncomfortable to millenials. This gap isn’t about intent, but about experience and trust. Gen Z, having grown up with digital tools and more open conversations around mental wellbeing, engages early and often. Older employees, on the other hand, may hesitate due to long-standing stigma or unfamiliarity with virtual support.
ekincare recognizes these nuances and is bridging the generational divide through technology enabled personalization and accessibility:
- By offering multichannel access including auto-confirmations, provider dashboards, and API integrations, ekincare ensures an experience that works for everyone. Whether it’s digital-native Gen Z users or older employees who prefer more guided, simplified support, the platform is designed to be intuitive, inclusive, and easy to navigate across comfort levels.
- Also, ekincare offers a range of engagement sessions including counselling, meditation, and mindfulness that are delivered virtually and through onsite wellness camps. These initiatives not only support individual mental wellbeing but also help organizations create a healthier, more focused, and resilient workforce, leading to improved morale, reduced burnout, and enhanced overall productivity.
These initiatives show how ekincare isn’t just digitizing healthcare it’s humanizing it across generational boundaries.
You’ve called ekincare a shift “from health insurance to health intelligence.” What does this mean in real terms for a CHRO or CFO deciding on employee benefits?
Most organizations have long relied on health insurance as their primary health benefit, essentially, a safety net for when things go wrong. But today’s workforce challenges demand more than that. The shift to “health intelligence” means giving CHROs and CFOs real-time visibility into workforce health trends, risk factors, and engagement levels, not just claims data. It’s about anticipating issues, not just reacting to them. With integrated analytics, personalized interventions, and predictive insights, leaders can align health strategies with business goals. This empowers decision-makers to move from passive coverage to active care, where employee wellbeing directly supports productivity, retention, and long-term cost control.
With India’s workforce spread across metros and smaller towns, how does ekincare solve for pan-India consistency in healthcare access, diagnostics, and service quality?
Healthcare access in India is anything but uniform, what’s easily available in a metro can be difficult to access in a tier-2 or tier-3 city. For a distributed workforce, this creates clear disparities in care. At ekincare, the approach has been to build a deeply integrated ecosystem that works seamlessly across geographies. Whether an employee is in Mumbai or Moradabad, they get access to the same network of diagnostic labs, verified doctors, and digital health services through a unified platform. By combining local partnerships with centralized quality control and tech-enabled coordination, we ensure consistent care, faster service, and reliable outcomes regardless of location.
While the providers are spread across geographies in the country, they are accreditated and governed by standard certifications like ISO, NABL, and NABH. Irrespective of the location, ekincare onboards providers have these certifications. As these certifications are standard irrespective of geography, they guide and ensure maintenance of required standards in the centers.
Additionally, ekincare has a rating system for appointments. These ratings are used to identify, govern, and develop providers to meet users’ requirements. The current average ratings of all services across the country are at 4.4 including all service lines. This rating is the voice of the Pan India audience based on their experience through the country and for online services.
What trends are you seeing across high-burnout sectors like pharma and healthcare? Is digital wellness enough or does the future require deeper integration into workplace culture?
Burnout in sectors like pharma and healthcare is becoming both a human and business challenge. The emotional toll on employees is clear, but so is the impact on productivity, absenteeism, and attrition. While digital wellness tools have improved access to support, they’re only one piece of the puzzle. What is needed is deeper cultural integration of wellbeing into daily workflows where support isn’t reactive but preventive. For businesses, this means aligning wellness with performance goals, training managers to spot early signs of stress, and designing policies that prioritise mental resilience. When wellbeing becomes part of how the organisation operates, not just an add-on, the results benefit both people and the bottom line.
This can be done through engagement and awareness sessions for employees.
The engagement sessions can be designed based on the industry and the types of stress. Few examples of such sessions are onsite yoga, meditation, preventive awareness sessions on critical illnesses. Carnivals with a combination of informative sessions and fun activities.
Your platform integrates physical, mental, and social well-being. What are the complexities of delivering this kind of holistic care on a scale, especially for large organizations?
Supporting employee wellbeing today means going beyond physical health; it’s about addressing mental and social dimensions too. But delivering this kind of holistic care at scale isn’t straightforward, especially for large, distributed workforces. Real complexity lies in personalization. Different employees have different needs, comfort levels, and health goals, and a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work. There’s also the challenge of unifying fragmented services into one seamless experience while maintaining quality and consistency. At the backend, it requires robust data integration, real-time insights, and adaptive engagement strategies. For large organizations, the key is to make care feel personal, not generic—even when it’s delivered at scale.
The services are designed based on the industry being addressed and based on the organization’s requests. ekincare has achieved this by onboarding and providing services through diverse set of partners, providers that are selected to ensure coverage of comprehensive services that covers different age groups, genders and their respective requirements. Each of these partners is assessed based on customer ratings and Care programs are designed based on the client’s requests.
Looking ahead, what are your strategic priorities for ekincare over the next 2–3 years in terms of product innovation, partnerships, or global expansion?
We see OPD benefits becoming bigger than IPD in the next few years—and that’s where we’re doubling down. The focus is on solving the cashless OPD experience end-to-end for both employers and employees in India. At the same time, we’re looking to grow with our existing customers beyond India, especially in Southeast Asia, and expand ekincare’s wallet share as their health benefits partner.
