Hardeep Singh
Practo’s Establishment
Practo is a 2008-founded online health management service provider based in India. It surpassed 40 million appointments a year in 2015, making it the world’s biggest appointment booking website. Practo aims to provide better medical consultations with the best doctors all over the world.
ND Shashank and Abhinav Lal, both graduates of the National Institute of Technology, Surathkal, formed Practo in 2008. It started off as a “doctor management software supplier.” It created a “consumer-facing doctor discovery” and “appointment scheduling website” a few years back.
It also delivers medicines and has ventured into the skin and fitness market. Practo was valued at $600-650 million in 2017. The firm employed 2,500 people in 35 cities across six countries as of 2015. Tencent Holdings, Google Capital, Sequoia Capital, Yuri Milner, Matrix Partners, Altimeter Capital, Belgium’s Sofina, Recruit Holdings, and Thrive Capital are among the company’s investors.
Insta Health, FitHo, Genii, and Qikwell are among the companies that have been acquired. Practo is now available in over 20 countries. Every year, 18 crore patients use the app, which has over one lakh doctors on board and over 70,000 clinics and hospitals as partners.
Turning Point for Practo
In 2020, covid cases were at a peak. The rising cases had made everyone locked out in their homes. Practo got a tremendous opportunity to grow its business with home online consultations with the best doctors. Though telemedicine usage has been small thus far, India has seen some recent development, with health tech startup Practo being a leader in the field.
Kalpana V, a Practo regular, was in search of a doctor for her child while she was living in a village along the coast. It was raining and there was a cyclone, but finding a doctor in the nearest town must have been impossible. Practo, a doctor-finding and consultation service, rushed to her rescue.
Kalpana’s internet access was spotty, so she got a call from a doctor on her phone instead, and she got a prescription as well, she stated in her review of the application on Google’s Play store last November.
After the Covid-19 pandemic forced millions of Indians to locate doctors online from the comfort of their homes, anecdotes like Kalpana’s are becoming less popular. In a recent interview with Forbes India, Abhinav Lal, co-founder and chief technical officer at Bengaluru’s Practo, said that one of the least well-known changes was that people sought treatment for mental illness more readily than they had before.
The Indian telemedicine industry is expected to reach $4.25 billion over the next five years, according to estimates. According to a survey by the World Health Organization (WHO), India has one doctor for every 1,139 residents.
Platforms like 1MG, which has a popular investor in Sequoia, Tiger Global-backed Lybrate, and mfine compete with Practo today. Practo has evolved from a SaaS website to one that charts a patient’s whole path, from scheduling an appointment to locating a lab, having a second opinion, patient experience reviews, prescription reminders, and finally bringing medicine to the patient’s door.
Practo’s Regional Language Update
Recently, Practo launched its online consultation in 15 regional languages to help people understand better their medical queries with their regional language. Practo said an effort like this would be crucial in bridging the gap and addressing language gaps in India’s rising digital healthcare ecosystem, noting that 9 out of 10 current internet users are native language speakers.
This app actually provides 15 languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, and Bengali, with more is being added soon, according to a news release. Practo is one step closer to knocking down entry barriers for 200 million specific users in the future, according to the update.
The Practo software and website will also embrace local languages, and the company plans to add additional interface capabilities to make the doctor-patient relationship more streamlined and interactive, according to the company.
As per the company, this was introduced as a pilot scheme earlier this year after obtaining lakhs of customer request for linguistically features on Practo, with Hindi as an alternative choice for users can choose. Practo certainly to provide better services.
This health tech has proved to the best till now and it is focusing on the growth of the company with the best consultation, health care facilities. At the moment, India has 48 startups valued at $1 billion or more, with Paytm keeping the title of a most expensive startup with a $16 billion valuation. We could see Practo as a part of the Unicorn list soon.
