It’s easy to look at successful business leaders and marvel at their accomplishments. Yet, these successful achievers don’t just appear out of thin air. They work towards success with humble beginnings beyond all obstacles, to becoming successful with dedication and effort. Women Entrepreneur’s exclusive team rendezvous with one such well-established business leader, Sonali Srungaram, Founder & MD, Cipher Oncology, who worked through all odds to challenge the traditional norms of the oncology space in India to transform it into a more structured and conventional industry.

Prior to being an entrepreneur, Sonali was associated with Accenture for 12 years in the Strategy Consulting practice - managing strategic and transformational projects for large multinational corporations across Asia- Pacific, India, and the UK. She took a big departure from what her previous experiences in the corporate world used to be - about working for larger institutions to show them better ways of not just saving costs but increasing their revenue to look at an extremely demanding and unstructured sector, which has not innovated for a very long time. Her innovations in the oncology space from a distributed care delivery model to an allied services support model are now garnering the attention of leading cancer institutions in the country. Let’s hear from Sonali about how she was driven by a desire to disrupt the status quo and bring an impactful change in the space of oncology.

Tell us about the underlying idea behind the venture. What are some of the most unique features of Cipher Oncology?

It was in the year 2012 when I returned to India and was taking a step back from my corporate experience and looking for a change of focus on my professional career when a couple of my family members were affected with cancer made me witness, very closely, the brutality of the disease and its treatment facilities in India. That is when I realized I wanted to shift my focus from making larger institutions do better to creating an impact in a place that was extremely unstructured. Since then, my aspiration has been to solve cancer patients’ needs for integrative care and to ease their struggle to find it.

For the first seven years of our research in the oncology space, we developed a precursor to Cipher Oncology called Cipher Healthcare. We started the first cancer helpline in India and within two years we served about 45,000 patients across eight languages. This also made us realize that 90 percent of the cancer population is in suburban and rural areas, and unfortunately, the majority of our infrastructure is only geared toward urban setups. Soon, we established cancer clinics - allied care centers across several districts of India. We collaborated with the government of Telangana and conducted massive programs on screening; we helped screen around 31,00,000 people across 12 districts in Telangana for oral, breast, and cervical cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. This is when the entire idea for Cipher Oncology started falling into place.

"Our main aim has been to empower patients to take control of their health while we become their companions in the journey"

We were very clear on our thought right from the beginning - we wanted to create treatment centers very different from traditional centers in India – we wanted to be distributed across suburban districts, and we aimed to be day-care centers and extremely patient-centric. Our main aim has been to empower patients to take control of their health while we become their companions in the journey. Today, we are about 120 people including 12 oncologists spreading across seven physical units, and 20 hospitals across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. We are pioneers in providing chemotherapies and surgeries in districts away from large urban cities.

Tell us about some of the key milestones you have achieved for Cipher Oncology.

One of the biggest milestones has been to create a completely new business model despite it facing a lot of skepticism; we were able to question the norms of the industry and challenge the status quo of something as complicated as oncology. To be a leading player in the industry and watching some of our competitors now, in a way, mimicking what we have already done has been quite a milestone for us. To have other institutions recognize the work that we are doing brings a lot of satisfaction to us. The second greatest achievement was protocolizing a lot of our work and pivoting through the unstructured market to establish centers in two different states of the country functioning in the same manner.

Drawing from your own experiences, what would you advise emerging women entrepreneurs who aspire to make a mark in their respective industries?

The very important thing for entrepreneurs, either men or women is to be very clear about their goals because entrepreneurship comes with a lot of roadblocks. They must be able to juggle elements of their personal and professional life, especially for women, it does get harder. The environment has been very conducive for men to be able to achieve their goals, and it's been my experience that women have to work a bit harder to get to the same level. For me, the only thing that has worked is being very clear about my destination. However, the times are changing for the better, and barriers for women are much lower compared to 20 years back. With that transformation, I hope to witness a lot more women entrepreneurs coming in with creative & innovative ideas and bringing impactful changes in the ecosystem.

Sonali Srungaram,  Founder & Md, Cipher Oncology

An alumnus of the ISB, Sonali is supporting the cause of effective cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment and has been working extensively to create patient-centric models of cancer care.