Practo Brings the Entire Healthcare Ecosystem on One Tech Enabled Platform
New age technology has made it possible for consumers to connect with a doctor instantaneously, book appointments, online consultations, maintain medical records or even ordering medicines online. In order to reap the complete benefits of digital healthcare, it is important to bring the entire healthcare ecosystem on one tech enabled platform which solves the healthcare problem and delivers quality healthcare for all. While, the government is working on maintaining patient health records digitally, there is still a wide gap to bridge which simplifies patient care and eases doctors’ management challenges.
Therefore, there is definitely a need for a digitally integrated healthcare system which address the needs of patients and doctors alike without having to compromise of security, authenticity and most importantly quality of healthcare that is too delivered. Practo has been relentlessly working on bridging this gap and getting the entire healthcare community of a single platform.
In an exclusive interaction with Sujata Sangwan of BWDisrupt, Shashank ND, Founder & CEO, Practo, talks about the need and importance of integrated healthcare system in India.
What is the importance of integrated healthcare system in India? What is Practo’s role in building an integrated healthcare infrastructure?
While the healthcare industry is slowly moving towards digital, there is still a need for common integrated platform that connects the different stakeholders that have been largely in silos. We believe that unless we connect the entire healthcare ecosystem on a single integrated platform where suppliers and providers can not only connect and discover each other but where the whole ecosystem works in concert to ensure healthcare delivery becomes more widespread, and more efficient.
Healthcare, is a massive problem to solve. If you look at the consumer side, the problems are considerable – there is lack of information about the provider, about the treatment, about the options as well as lack of accurate health history creates significant challenges in getting the right care. Sometimes you will reach a hospital and realize that it can take you almost a whole day to even get a bed and get admitted - when leaving, consumers have to wait for hours to just settle the bills and getting all their records collated and more.
On the provider side too, there are considerable issues – uncertainty about appointments turnouts. This leads to providers double booking the same time – and then if both patients turn up, one has to wait. Do this over multiple patients and it becomes evident why the wait times are so long. Secondly, most patients won’t show up with their medical histories or will often either knowingly or unknowingly leave out key details – which then impacts a doctor’s ability to provide the right diagnosis and treatment – which ultimately harms the patient. The problem doesn’t end there, even post the right diagnosis, there are huge issues with patients’ not really sticking to the prescribed dosage and schedule – which will often lead to partial cures, relapses, and in many cases- drug resistance - which means a stronger drug being prescribed which is obviously not a good thing.
If you look at these in isolation, it may appear to be simplistic issues but they are not and they have far reaching consequences on the overall health and wellbeing of our people, the affordability of healthcare itself as well as their ability to contribute to our country’s growth and development.
At Practo we are trying to build a connected healthcare platform to simplify the needs of all stakeholder including patients, healthcare providers (clinics and hospitals). This is essentially a unique full stack of healthcare solution that connects a vibrant marketplace with tens of millions of consumers to a strong community of healthcare providers including enterprises most of which are running Practo’s software. These services are integrated deeply with each other and work in concert to provide services that weren’t otherwise possible to do. It maps the entire journey of a patient right from booking an appointment, finding a lab, getting a second opinion, patient experience feedback, medicine reminder to delivering medicine at the patients doorstep.
Having said this, we strongly believe that we’re just getting started and there is a huge opportunity that lies ahead to help consumers live healthier, longer lives by helping them make better healthcare decisions.
Why is there a need to simplify and standardize healthcare?
One of the main reasons why there is a need to simplify healthcare today is because information is powerful. It is estimated that by 2020 healthcare industry worldwide will produce 25,000 petabytes of data. The length and breadth of complexity presiding in this industry today showcases the need to simplify and standardize information required for efficient management and help providers and consumers alike make better and informed decisions.
By providing more comprehensive and more accurate information about a healthcare provider, we are able to help the patient make a better choice on who is the right provider for them. Qualification of the doctors listed, their consultation charges, visiting timing etc. are available to the consumers. On the other hand by providing a more complete history to the healthcare provider due to the digital records patients trust us with, we are able to seamlessly provide detailed history to the provider (if the patient wants us to) and this leads to exponentially more accurate diagnosis and better treatment, resulting in faster recovery.
What is the future of tech enabled healthcare services in India?
If you look at the healthcare sector, it is one of the last sectors to be disrupted by technology. Nothing much had changed when you compared 20 years ago with three years ago. Now, of course, things are looking up. The rising mobile led internet penetration has given consumers access to products and services that they can avail at lightning speed. And with the complete deployment of 4G in India, the demand of digital healthcare will only grow from here on. And many segments including healthcare, Pharma will tap this opportunity and create an online platform for the convenience of the consumers.
The Internet has already expanded beyond India’s English speaking population and will only continue to reach more and more non-English speaking people. This implies a huge need for vernacular content so that services can cover more parts of the country. Today, patients are able to get reminders from doctors listed on Practo in various languages including Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati and Marathi. We are also in the process of offering Practo Search in 3 local languages including Hindi by the end of 2016. Additionally, Practo Ray is available in 10 regional languages.
At Practo, we envision a world where technology will help consumers find the best doctors with a few clicks. Generating, accessing and storing health records would be entirely digital. Patients will have a single health account linked to their families that will store their health information securely, and provide helpful information (for example: prescription reminders to take medicine in a timely manner) to help people live healthier, longer lives.
What are the product and services which Practo is working on?
We will continue our strong focus on our ‘full stack’ hyperloop strategy. We will further strengthen our enterprise segment where we’re seeing incredibly strong demand for our software, hardware and marketing products. In fact, with such volume of enterprises coming online on our platform, this is frankly the first time anywhere in the world that so many large Enterprises, SMEs and consumers are all on the same platform, this will fundamentally transform healthcare access and delivery making it easier for providers to provide better care to patients and for patients to access high quality providers.
All our efforts have always been to build quality products and provide deeper integration with each other and make healthcare a delightful experience for the user by making it incredibly easy for them to make better healthcare choices.
What is Practo’s monetization model? Are there any new streams in the pipeline?
We currently have 5 monetization avenues:
o Practo Ray: Software for clinics and doctors – This is a cloud based clinic management software for doctors that digitises the entire practice management for them. Doctors and clinics pay us an annual subscription to use the software. We have over 90% market share here and we are growing the pie aggressively.
o Qikwell by Practo: This is an OPD SaaS solution that helps manage the outpatient department for the hospital by enabling them to streamline their patient management and online booking
o Insta by Practo: This is a complete HIMS solution for hospitals and we currently customers in over 15 countries using this solution from us.
o Practo Tab: This is a hardware loaded with Practo Ray that runs the entire clinic management. Doctors again pay an annual subscription for Ray and the tab.
o Practo Reach: Hyper local targeted ad platform that allows establishments (hospitals, diagnostic centers and clinics) to advertise to the relevant consumers (as per MCI issued guidelines). Individual doctors cannot advertise on Practo Reach.
We have lately started a trial on medicine delivery in some parts of Bangalore and plan to expand soon. Additionally, we follow an asset light strategy and its unique products and the deep penetration and integration across key healthcare sectors ensures a vibrant business model with healthy margins that have put Practo on the road to profitability in the short term. In fact, certain aspects of Practo’s business are already profitable and we are already on a track to achieve full profitability by next year.
