How Practo is leveraging ICT to transform healthcare

By Salvi Mittal

Shashank ND, CEO and Founder, Practo

How does Practo ease medical access for people in India using ICT?

We're the largest healthcare platform in Asia and every month, we help millions of consumers find the right healthcare professionals for them.

We are the only technology-based healthcare company (in the world) that is addressing the healthcare issue from both the doctor as well as the patient side. Our doctor discovery platform- Practo search allows consumers to easily find the right doctor and book instant appointments on the basis of locality, specialty, availability, customer feedback as well as price. For doctors, we have built Practo Ray - a SaaS product from the ground up to offer the best-practice management software in the market. With the help of Practo Ray, doctors do not worry about simple things like keeping track of appointments and inventory management.

Today, we connect millions of patients to over 200,000 healthcare practitioners across 35 cities and 3 countries.

How do you plan to reach patients and doctors in remote corners of India? Can telecom operators play a role in aiding remote healthcare?

Earlier this year, we announced our plan to expand into 35 cities in India - we have already achieved that! We plan to rapidly expand and cover other parts of India as well as expand into other countries. Almost 20-25% of traffic already comes from Tier II and Tier III cities. This shows that there is huge demand for healthcare in these regions. We will continue to cater to consumers across different geographies. We will continue to expand, scale and build new products that will not just help the 1 billion people in India but also the billions around the world find and connect with the right healthcare practitioner.

As a relatively young venture, what are the key operational challenges you face on a regular basis?

When you are building a disruptive product, you obviously face many challenges. When we started building Practo Ray, the biggest challenge (apart from gathering insights about what would be useful to doctors) was how to build a hyper-responsive product in a market where internet penetration was low and speeds not as good as what we see in many other markets. We literally counted (and still do) our performance in milliseconds to see how responsive and fast our product is and how quickly it can provide the relevant information to the user.

When building practo.com, the biggest challenge was how we get reliable information about doctors and clinics. We wanted information to be 100% reliable and accurate so we decided to build our own healthcare map of the world. We have an on-ground team that literally goes street-by-street, city-by- city to capture doctor and clinic information, which is then put through a rigorous verification system to ensure we only have genuine doctors with absolutely accurate details.

Third challenge we faced was building the right infrastructure to scale our product. We're growing at an extremely fast pace - so obviously, the infrastructure, servers, etcetera, have to keep up, while at the same time maintaining the highest levels of security and encryption. Hence, we keep a dedicated team that ensures our service is always available and is hyper-responsive.

How do you see role of M2M communications in healthcare sector? What are the challenges you came across and how do you plan to tackle them?

M2M is interesting in the sense that it can automate a lot of monitoring aspects and send real-time updates to the healthcare provider as well as create accurate healthcare records and medical history. But, of course, that is more around monitoring. We believe that technology can play a transformational role in bringing healthcare practitioners to the digital era. For example, we provide a tablet product called Practo Tab, which helps doctors provide a superior in-clinic experience to their patients. Add to that Practo Ray, our cloud-based clinic management software, which allows doctors to automate and simplify their practice management and focus on the patients. Today, Practo Ray is the solution of choice with over 90% market share and helps doctors manage millions of patients a month.

What according to you should be done to radically change the healthcare service delivery with ICT intervention? Is Practo doing something in this regard?

We believe that ICT can fundamentally transform healthcare. In fact, healthcare is among the last industries to be completely disrupted by technology. The challenges remain on both sides of the equation - for consumers, it is an information challenge - at a very basic level it boils down to how they find reliable information about healthcare practitioners so they can decide who is the right one for them. At the same time, for doctors, it's about how technology can help simplify and automate large parts of their workflow so they can focus on the patients rather than worry about IT management.

We think to truly solve the healthcare challenge, we need to solve both problems simultaneously - this is why we have Practo Search to help consumers find the right healthcare practitioner and Practo Ray to help health care practitioners focus on treating patients.

This interview is a part of "We Enable Change Makers series" enabled by Ericsson.