Shashank ND,the founder and CEO of Practo Technologies,
India’s leading healthcare management app devised the application quotes
by accident it is strange how certain incidents of occurrences in our
lives figured that Spark or thought of innovation to come up with
something really new and impactful for the society as a whole. It so
happened that Shashank father had to undergo funny replacement surgery
back in 2008 but Shashank wanted to get second opinion from a surgeon in
the United States.
However there were no medical records online
that could be shared with the US surgeon. This one incident that
happened with Shashank sparked a new thought basically a view that how
many others in this country faced this problem of not having online
medical records. Then he started working on figuring out the solution
for this and he realized it could be an online repository or an app or
something which the doctors had to help themselves with and not be
binding on the patience to do it because it would then be that much more
cumbersome. So he came up with this idea and floated it around a few
doctors in Bangalore the city where he was born and brought up. His
takeaway from his father situation was that the world could use was
digitized, accessible and shareable medical records.
But most of
them did not approve of the idea saying it is not a plausible one.
Shashank continued with his quest nonetheless. To make good of the idea,
he needed hands for which he sought involvement from his college mate
Abhinav Lal. When Shashank sounded him out, Lal was reluctant initially
as they were still in the 3rd year of graduation and as also his parents
did not approve of this proposition.
Partner & the initial team
However
Shashank cajoled and convinced him to eventually join the effort of
creating something very new, exciting, and useful for the society. They
started collected few lakhs from and started off coding at Shashank’s
grand-parents’ house (unused) in JP Nagar (Bengaluru).But something like
that required additional hands; so they invited coders who shared their
vision, passion, and also had the ability to build applications on
cloud. Within just a few days they were about 10 of them working to get
this Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform ready – they initially called
in turb-doc.in- which they did in just a matter of 14 days from
starting coding.
Dissemination, adoption, and the early challenges
Monetization
wasn’t on their minds when they started out, as the primary motive
behind creating this platform was to serve the community, make sure they
had easy access to healthcare information - all of it that they ever
wanted to have before taking an informed decision.
For that to
happen, it was the medicos i.e. the doctors and practitioners who needed
to be equipped with the application – a solution that can store all the
medical records on the history of patient’s medication, reports in
anything and everything that related to the patients so this was a hard
sell for the young engineers as the doctors whom they met were not so
optimistic about something like that.
Then there were other
operational and business challenges as well in the adoption of the
platforms. The biggest one of them was that internet was in its nascent
stages back then besides the fact that doctors were not very inclined on
going to the web, much less about using smart phones in delivering care
to their patients and recording the proceedings.
Slowly and
surely, never pegged back by any limitation whatsoever and fueled by
their desire and commitment towards the society, Shashank and Lal and
the team of 10 geeks went about their job creating applications that
helped the businesses - that is the medical centers, hospitals, doctors,
diagnostic centers and, importantly, the patients. The software which
was built to address the problems of patients in India, helped doctors
upload and store medical records and prescriptions and manage billing
and appointment details.
Investor interest
When
they started off they never ever thought of how or why somebody should
invest into their business. All they were worried about was how to make
people use their platform effectively. They sold the products to doctors
only on a referral basis which lead the business to just grow
organically and they did not invest any major capital into it. It went
on like that for a couple of years until 2010/11 when the Managing
Director of a venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, ever so
inadvertently, stumbles upon this service.
The gentleman had had a
shoulder surgery and through the course of his post-surgical
medication, realized that there was this app called Practo that was
called into action a great number of times all through his recovery.
This, kind of, amazed him a great deal and that very moment he could see
that here was an application platform as a service that held great
promise for both his venture capital firm as well as the community at
large.
But he didn’t jump in with an investment blindly; he waited
for another few months before finally getting in with a capital of
$500,000 which was which was a very small investment compared with
anything else the company had invested in its history.
With such
capital infused into the business, the engineer duo went ahead expanding
their areas of service first expanding to Chennai and then subsequently
to other major cities of the country such as Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi,
Kolkata, and Pune.
The team that had started with 10 people in a
matter of 5 years grew to 500 and then the subsequent year and a half
later grew to more than 2000. Practo is today India’s leading healthcare
management platform besides being the world’s fourth largest subscribed
health management application, next only to leading competitors such as
Zocdoc and Guahao. The app was voted the best app at Google Think
Mobile Conference 2014.
Where it stands today
Thanks
to Shashank and his team’s relentless zest to serve humanity, the
company is today valued at USD $500 million with further rounds of
investment flowing in – in fact, chasing it from various quarters.
Apart from Sequoia Capital which increased its investment, Practo
secured funding from others funders that included Matrix Partners,
Tencent Holdings, Sofina, Google Capital and Yuri Milner taking the
total investment from various rounds of funding to about USD$125
million.
Not only that, the company’s operations areas of business
today has2,500 employees working across 35 cities and six countries
serving in more than 100 cities across 8 countries, with was about
230000 medical practitioners registered for IT services serving a
patient base of about 4 million visitors every month. Experts and
industry-watchers opine that Practo’s advantage over its competition
lies in the fact that it is present in the B2B (management software) and
B2C (doctor discovery platform) space, covering both ends of the health
care ecosystem. Shashank says it has become the world’s largest
appointment-booking platform with over 40 million appointments annually.
It is present in four other countries too—Singapore, Brazil, Indonesia
and Philippines—and is exploring entering newer markets in Latin
America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The quest to
continuously improve and conform to their founding ideals, Shashank
makes sure the company is still run like a start-up – which is hard to
achieve after 7 years into operations and a valuation of half a billion
dollars. So, what he says is, along with organic growth, they have
embarked on an acquisition path that has seen them equip themselves with
start-ups with complementary capabilities that add variety to their
offerings – thus, helping them to function as start-ups. The app is now
also available in 10 vernacular language of the country so as to
support seamless communication for even non-English speaking patients.
Education and family
Born
to erudite parents who were employed with government departments and
there was a set pattern for his life that they wanted him to achieve –
so well in school, pursue engineering, and then get a good job. All of
which he did: had his schooling from the National Public School,
Rajajinagar and then completed his engineering from the National
Institute of Technology (NIT), Surathkal, Karnataka.
Quotes |
| “When we get more capital, when we add more people, it is multiplicative and not divisive in anyway.” |
| “Like
you have your professional life on LinkedIn, social life on Facebook,
we aim to be the go to platform for your health and well-being.” |
| “If
someone has stomach pain, we are helping that person go to the right
doctor nearby. A common man doesn’t understand medical jargon,”says
Shashank. “We are trying to increase the trust between doctors,
hospitals and patients by making the process transparent and eliminating
the barrier of lack of information. We want to help consumers make a
more informed decision.” |
| "We
don’t follow any model or company. Getting influenced and starting
something is not sustainable in the long run,” he says. " Original ideas
are always ahead in the race.” |
| “Under
Practo, we have different business units and many of them are turning
profitable this year. We as a company will turn profitable mid of next
year [2017], including our international operations. The software
business is already running in a profitable manner.” |
| “The idea of Practo didn’t come from anywhere else. It originated from India and the problems we face.” |
| “Absence of digital health records is a common problem all over the world.” |
| “The long-term plan is to help improve human longevity by simplifying health care.” |
| “Just like you know Mountain View because of Google, or Menlo Park because of Facebook, I want people to know JP Nagar.” |