SINGAPORE: Healthcare start-up Doctor Anywhere trimmed its workforce by 8.1 per cent, laying off around 45 employees across Southeast Asia. The dismissals were announced by Lim Wai Mun, Doctor Anywhere’s founder and CEO, in a company-wide email earlier this month, according to a report in The Business Times on Thursday (Dec 12).
None of the individuals laid off are medical doctors or health professionals, BT added, as the restructuring exercise mainly involved its tech team.
The Singapore-based company was founded in 2017 and provides both telehealth and online consultations locally as well as in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, with users relying on the Doctor Anywhere app to facilitate appointments.
The company serves over 2.8 million people across Southeast Asia. In Singapore, it has seven clinics as well as a medical centre on Orchard Road.
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CNA reports Doctor Anywhere as saying that its workforce restructuring is part “of a broader effort to adapt to current economic challenges and secure the company’s long-term sustainability”. The layoffs affected less than 20 per cent of the company’s Singapore staff.
In January 2022, Doctor Anywhere announced it was intending to grow its workforce in Singapore by hiring 200 more people to add to the 450 employees the company already had at that point.
Dealstreet Asia reported that according to the company’s filings with Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), Doctor Anywhere posted $44.6 million in after-tax losses in 2022 and $43.5 million in losses in 2023.
“This difficult decision was made to ensure DA remains focused on areas where we can deliver the greatest impact to our patients and partners, and align most closely with our mission to build a more affordable and accessible ‘Hospital Anywhere’ model in Asia,” Doctor Anywhere told CNA.
As the company streamlined operations, some of the positions had grown “duplicative”. The company, however, told CNA that it offered alternative roles within Doctor Anywhere where it deemed suitable and that it was continuing to hire new staff for other functions.
It is also helping the affected staff with severance benefits that include “severance pay based on tenure, notice period pay, leave encashment, and extended healthcare coverage where applicable”. Where necessary, Doctor Anywhere will also extend immigration assistance to dismissed employees. /TISG
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