Southeast Asia orders dinner by phone, so why has only 1 in 5 used telehealth?

Only one in five people in Southeast Asia have ever used a telehealth service, according to the consumer research firm Milieu, in a region that orders its dinner and its clothes by phone. The apps that survived did it by selling to employers. If you have just left a job to build something, the check-up your company booked for you stayed behind with the lanyard.

Doctor Anywhere opened in Singapore in 2017 as an app for video consultations with a doctor. By 2020, at the height of the pandemic, it served about one million users a month, a mix of people paying for themselves and staff whose companies had signed up.

Then the lockdowns lifted. Indonesia’s Newman’s and Singapore’s Ferne Health shut, Doctor Anywhere pulled out of Vietnam, and Aide, a Philippine platform arranging 300 home doctor visits a day, sold to the conglomerate unit AC Health.

The survivors found the same customer: the company.

“I cannot force customers to get sick.”

Halodoc now works with about 3,000 companies that give the app to staff as a benefit. Doctor Anywhere widened its corporate business in 2021 and in 2025 posted its first operating profit in four years. Its chief executive, Wai Mun Lim, told Tech in Asia why the consumer business alone could not carry it: “I cannot force customers to get sick.”

That sentence is the whole mechanism, read from the patient’s side. Kid Parchariyanon of SeaX Ventures calls healthcare a business of three Ps, the patient, the payer and the provider, and a sale needs all three. For an employee the payer is the human resources team, and the annual screening arrives as a calendar invite.

For a solo founder, nobody sends the invite.

For a solo founder, nobody sends the invite.

The one programme that checked people who never booked shows what goes unread. Indonesia’s Cek Kesehatan Gratis, a free check-up the government gives every citizen around their birthday, screened more than 8.2 million people in its first months after launching on 10 February 2025. One in five had high blood pressure, and diabetes turned up in 5.9 percent.

The health ministry reported both conditions turning up in younger age groups, not only the old. Grade the number honestly: this is screening data, Level 2 at best. A single high reading needs a repeat before it is a diagnosis, and no screening proves that a check-up lengthens a life.

What it does prove is prevalence. In a room of people who felt fine, one in five carries a blood pressure that raises their risk of stroke and heart disease, the two leading causes of death in Indonesia.

The protocol that replaces the HR invite is one appointment a year, and the price is almost nothing. In Singapore, a citizen enrolled with a Healthier SG clinic pays zero for the national screening, which covers cardiovascular risk and, by age, cervical and colorectal cancer; an eligible citizen who has not enrolled pays US$3.9 (S$5).

In Indonesia, the birthday voucher is claimable up to a month after the date, at the community health centre. The cost you are paying is one morning. The thing you are buying is the reading your old employer used to collect for you.

Lim built a profitable company on the fact that people rarely book a doctor unprompted. Across the region, the market ran that experiment for five years and got the same answer every time. The only patient it cannot predict is the one who puts the appointment in the calendar the week of their own birthday.