START-UP ISLAND. Disruptive ideas, constructive care

Much of big business is about products of the future made available today. But changing the status quo sometimes involves looking at gaps in the market that have not attracted the attention of those who could potentially solve these problems.

This edition of Start-up Island looks at the business models of two healthcare ventures that sought to tackle the obvious but unsolved challenges faced by consumers.

For Shashank ND, it all started with a personal emergency in the family. Once, a doctor his father was consulting could not email them his medical reports. Another time, while in the ICU, his father was administered an injection he was allergic to. What this boiled down to for Shashank was thinking about how Practo.com would empower the consumer.

“I knew from my technical background that an email button takes a few lines of code. But going further, the big idea my co-founder Abhinav and I had was to create an account for every individual where all his/her healthcare data could be stored and made available. It’s a powerful thing, and can help avoid medical emergencies,” says Shashank, CEO and Founder, Practo.com.

Practo has a consumer platform and a practice management software. With 1.3 lakh doctors listed on its consumer site, it attracts four million searches a month. Its SaaS solution, Practo Ray, has won the company 90 per cent market share with doctors who use online software for scheduling appointments to billing patients.

“Practo Ray has become the default way for many doctors across the country to manage their practice. We’re now No. 1 in Singapore and the Philippines, and in India too, by a mile.

“We handle 12–15 million appointments every year on our consumer site and that fuels feedback from consumers and helps consumers decide which doctors to choose,” says Shashank.

Prana Healthcare was set up to fill the gap in the market for general physicians. The three co-founders discovered from a study of the market that although consumers wanted the home visits by a doctor, most doctors were interested in specialisations and senior consulting.

“In an urban setting, many people fall ill and head to the specialist. In nearly 80 per cent of the cases, the real need is for a general physician. The whole healthcare system is likely to crumble in a few years, there’ll hardly be any general physicians and consultants to look at primary care,” explains Harsha Doddihal, an oncologist and one of the founders of Prana. Since October 2013, Prana Healthcare has had its team of doctors serving households across Bengaluru. Gathering approximately from the number that take the national medical entrance exams, only about a quarter of the entrants get selected. What the start-up has done is tap into the pool of MBBS graduates that is waiting to be accepted for the next level at a medical school year after year.

“We allow the serving doctors to keep nearly 70-80 per cent of the fees so that their time is rewarded. That means they can work the hours they desire and go back to preparing for exams the rest of the time,” says Doddihal.

Prana is about providing primary medical care for everyone, anytime and anywhere. Operating at the moment with three diagnostic centres, the founding team plans to maintain a lean model so that the company’s outflow is controlled.

Practo, now over seven years in business, has climbed to leadership position in India. While it looks at a larger bite of the international market, Prana Healthcare will go nationwide tackling larger competitors. Both businesses have gone the mobile app route to win significant traction over short frames of time.

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