Practo is looking to scale faster riding on Covid-19, says CEO Shashank ND

Practo is preparing for a phase of rapid growth as health care gets the utmost importance amid the pandemic and its delivery rapidly moves online. 

The Bengaluru-headquartered digital health care firm, backed by investors such as Sequoia and Tencent, is looking at positioning itself as an ‘integrated digital platform’ and rapidly expanding its base of doctors, diagnostic centres, and the cities and towns it caters to.

“The awareness that Covid has brought about in consumer’s mind about health, I think digital health will continue to expand very sharply and positively in the next 4-5 years. We are excited about the opportunities that will come up for us and the digital health care ecosystem,” said Practo’s Chief Executive Shashank ND.

In the past six months alone, Practo, which has positioned itself as the largest doctor booking platform, has seen 10 times increase in consultations and the number of unique visitors has increased to 175 million. 

As telemedicine became the preferred medium for consultations, the firm saw over 70 per cent first time-users and 44 per cent users coming from non-metro cities. Practo’s medicine and diagnostic businesses also showed around three times growth since March. It is now looking at increasing the number of pin codes it caters to from 16,000 to 25,000.

“Health care is a wide space and there are probably about a million doctors in India, there are hospitals and clinics, pharmacies, diagnostics, insurance firms. So, we are actually creating an integrated approach of being able to connect all these pieces together,” Shashank said.

Practo started as a business-to-business (B2B) company, building software for doctors and offering them software as a service (SaaS). While the company continued with that model for six years, towards 2015 they started looking at the business-to-consumer (B2C) space. 

For the B2B business, the company said it would continue with international expansion. And, for the B2C segment, the focus would now be on “onboarding the next set of 200 million users over the next few years” by focusing on smaller towns and cities in India.