India’s young, urban workforce is confronting lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, PCOS, and heart disease much earlier than previous generations, making preventive health check-ups essential well before midlife. As convenience, speed and technology reshape how people access care, on-demand diagnostics, rapid home sample collection, and AI-enabled lab systems are nudging consumers from reactive testing to continuous health monitoring. In this context, Dhruv Gupta, Co-founder, Orange Health Labs, outlines how innovations like the company’s year-long preventive plan, Orange One, are designed to move Indians beyond one-off annual check-ups towards comprehensive, data-driven, and more proactive health management.
Why are preventive health check-ups becoming critical at a younger age in India?
The average age in India is about 30 years. Indians and South Asians are genetically predisposed to chronic metabolic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. So as the average age crosses 30, diseases start cropping up. In light of this, we have observed an increasing awareness of health among India’s younger age groups. Further, with the country’s growing chronic disease burden, we are witnessing a high volume of preventive tests among the younger population, including those for diabetes and vitamin deficiencies.
What shifts are you seeing in how working professionals approach regular health screening, and how does your 60-minute home collection with 6-hour reporting influence that behaviour?
In healthcare, convenience is not a luxury—it is a necessity. By offering quick and painless sample collection, a differentiated customer experience, and fast, accurate reports, we enable doctors to make quicker and more informed diagnoses. Today’s consumers increasingly see this level of efficiency and reliability as the baseline, and we believe this shift is raising expectations and standards across the healthcare ecosystem.
What lifestyle patterns are you seeing behind rising cases of diabetes, PCOS and heart disease?
The growing number of diabetes, PCOS, and heart disease cases is inextricably linked to the realities of urban living. The sedentary nature of work, prolonged screen time, and lack of exercise have had a profound effect on metabolic and hormonal imbalances. This is further exacerbated by irregular eating patterns, including skipped meals, late-night dinners, regular ordering of processed foods, and high sugar intake, which further disrupts blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity.
Stress and lack of sleep are also major urban factors. The fast-paced nature of work, constant engagement with technology, and poor sleep quality contribute to high cortisol levels, further increasing the risk of insulin resistance, heart disease, and hormonal imbalances like PCOS. Moreover, nutritional deficiencies often go undetected because of irregular patterns.
The most important aspect is that these conditions can often progress silently. In urban environments, health screenings remain largely reactive, taking place only when symptoms manifest. This is a major wake-up call for the need for proactive health care, early detection, and continuous health monitoring as a part of urban living.
What key problem does Orange One solve that traditional health packages do not?
Orange One moves away from the pay-per-test model used in the diagnostics industry and offers customers a year-long health monitoring plan. Under Orange One, customers receive a comprehensive full-body check-up covering more than 114 blood markers. These include parameters such as Apo A1 and Apo B, Troponin I for cardiac risk, HOMA-IR to assess insulin resistance, and an expanded hormonal and vitamin profile. Following the initial assessment, consumers can track their health throughout the year by ordering any of 100 essential diagnostic tests at no additional cost. These include thyroid function tests, lipid and cholesterol markers, and diabetes-related tests such as HbA1c.
While most people opt for an annual health check-up, they often seek to maximise the number of parameters for the lowest price. Orange One has been introduced to address the limitations of annual testing for preventive care and chronic condition management. We are focusing on creating value not by discounting, but by providing more services for the same investment. It is structured to allow health monitoring across the year without repeated payments for individual tests.
How does an annual plan with 114+ parameters encourage people to test more regularly?
Orange One enables customers to gain an extensive view of their health by offering them a year-long solution after a single payment for preventive check-ups. Considering that continuous health monitoring is necessary throughout the year, Orange One makes it easier for health management to be ongoing, and customers pay only once to manage their health for the entire year. In theory, customers could utilise services worth Rs 20,000 on the platform throughout the year without incurring additional charges.
Where are you using AI and automation today across logistics, lab processing and reporting?
AI is being used across the company to automate operations:
- Allocating the best logistics path for forward collections and reverse logistics
- Highlighting and improving operational flow within the labs themselves
- Using AI to augment decision-making by our medical team
Besides this, we also use AI
- To speed up product development for both internal and external products
- Enhance and generate marketing creatives
- How do you balance AI-driven insights with doctor and lab expert judgment?
We think of AI as a means to augment doctor decision-making. And that’s how we’re using it across the company. We have reams of data, and AI helps identify any outlier issues which may get missed during manual reviews.
We do not use AI to make decisions. We only use it to augment human decision-making by our doctors.
Do you see clear evidence that convenience is shifting people from reactive to preventive testing?
Five years ago, when we launched, Less than 5% of our orders were driven by preventive behaviour. Today, almost a third of our orders are driven by preventive testing. And this behaviour is only increasing in both quantity and the amount that each customer is willing to invest in their preventive health.
Customers are now increasingly investing not just in their blood markers but also in using genetic testing to identify long-term risks.
How will you keep Orange One users engaged with their health data throughout the year?
The Orange One plan is complemented by the Orange Health App, which provides insights into health status, identifies out-of-range parameters, recommends continuous monitoring, and shows health trends. Future developments in the app may include integrating medical AI and offering personalised suggestions for managing health risks. The app will also track the effects of lifestyle changes, diet modifications, and medications, allowing doctors to adjust treatment plans as necessary.
At scale, how can preventive plans reduce pressure on hospitals and advanced care?
With customers more proactively testing themselves not just on an annual basis, but we see this trend even on a quarterly basis among a cohort of our customers. This will help detect issues earlier and reduce the load on hospitals and advanced care.
Additionally, we see that even chronic customers from the younger generation are now actively monitoring their chronic markers and taking action towards controlling them through lifestyle interventions with their doctors, nutritionists, personal trainers, and lifestyle programmes.
Both of these trends bode well for managing advanced care.
What’s the next big innovation you foresee in on-demand diagnostics in India?
We see a significant uptick in at-home diagnostics becoming the dominant behaviour. This number was less than 5% in 2016-17. Today, it is anywhere between 25% to 30% of the urban market.
New tests are coming up that help customers detect diseases even earlier.
- Genetic-based cancer testing is coming up
- Cut microbiome testing is growing fast
- Allergy innovation is happening
Additionally, testing is getting miniaturised, and over time, we will probably see that some of the tests which are today done by machines in centres or through blood testing in labs will probably move into the house. We will have devices at home which customers can use to test themselves regularly.
Last but not least, we are seeing an increasing trend in consumers matching their wearable data along with their blood markers to get a complete picture of their health status.
