Management Assignment: Case Analysis of Practo Pvt Ltd
Question
Task:
Consider a case of “Practo: Transforming Healthcare Dynamics with Technology” written by Dr. Suchitra Mohanty and Dr. Azmal Hussain and write a detailed report on management assignment answering the following questions:
Q1. Discuss with Comments Practo’s tech-based healthcare initiative.
Q2. Do you believe Practo’s business model can be sustained in the long run? Support your answer with justifying arguments!
Answer
Introduction
The case analysis done in this management assignment talks about the Practo Technologies Private Limited, a leading company offers an online platform for its users for their healthcare needs. The platform facilitates the services such as automated online appointment scheduling and booking, billing and storage of the medical records of the patients. The company was founded in Bangalore, India in 2008 by Shashank ND, who currently serves as the CEO to the firm and Abhinav Lal, who serves as the CTO to the firm. The company provides its consumer and software business services in almost 5 countries and enterprise software business services in 10 additional countries. Nearly 200,000 healthcare providers are enlisted on the platforms that provide medical counsel to millions of patients. Nearly 50 million appointments are made every year via this platform and the number has been growing ever since. The client base of the company also includes hospitals, clinics and other medical institutions other than patients and doctors, and the company offers varied services to each of the segments of the customer base.
A1. Discuss with Comments Practo’s tech-based healthcare initiative.
Practo acts as a bridge between the patients seeking healthcare facilities and medical counsel and the doctors, clinics and hospitals providing these services to them. The firm has become a leading search platform for healthcare services in Asia and had nearly 40 million appointments in 2015 and the number grew to 50 million in 2020 (Practo, 2020). The company has attracted several prospectus investors and has 9 investors currently namely, Sequoia, Matrix Partners, Tencent, Altimeter, Yuri Milner, capitalG, Sofnia, ru-Net and Thrive Capital. The company received more than $100 million in investments from the investors. The firm made a number of acquisitions such as Qikwell, Genii Technologies, Fitho and Insta Health.
The online doctor search platform of Practo gained prominence in India, where the firm was founded in, however, the company soon gained momentum in South Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia among others. Practo offers a wide range of services for the patients, doctors, clinics and hospitals separately. The services for patients include search for doctors, search for clinics, doctor consultation, ordering for medicines, asking free health questions, reading about medicines, reading health articles, and the health app for overall healthcare services (Motha et al., 2017). The services for doctors include Practo Health Feed, Practo Pro App, Practo Consult, and Practo Profile. Ray by Practo, Practo Prime and Practo Reach are the services provided to health clinics. Practo Profile, Practo Prime, Practo Reach, Querent by Practo, Insta by Practo and Qikwell by Practo are the services that are offered to the hospitals. The firm has different revenue models for the four clientele it serves and the rates are different for different services. The company was attributed for more than 85% of the healthcare market in India in 2015 and this is a huge positive sign indicating the growth of the company from a small startup to a major firm (Jagtap et al., 2016). The company was initially dedicated towards building a platform for doctors where they had the facility to store and maintain the digital medical records of their patients.
The company soon launched Practo Ray, which was the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product in the country by the firm and this was a significant move since it aided the application of cloud-based technology in the field of healthcare. This was the first significant step in the revolution of the healthcare sector as brought together by Practo. Practo Ray gained much deserved success in this aspect and saw enormous growth as the number of enlisted healthcare professionals nearly doubled by every six months. This is because the platform was able to facilitate the doctors in uploading and maintaining the medical records of the patients and even access them at their own convenience and needs (Chauhan et al., 2015). The platform was able to fill in the gaps of the then facilities and this enabled the firm to reach ever greater realms of growth and development. Practo Ray was of immense help to the clinics as well as the software platforms helped the clinics to manage their clinical practice with much more ease by the integration of technology and gained nearly 90% market share in that arena.
The company has another major service platform known as Practo Reach that enhances the visibility of the healthcare professionals by highlighting the hospitals and clinics to the targeted customers via appropriate advertisements. This platform accounts for nearly 40% of the market revenue generated by the company in India.
Soon, the smartphone revolution happened in India and the country became one of the largest internet using countries all over the world. Consequently, the web-based platform of the firm saw a shift as the leaders of the firm decided to change the strategy of the company to mobile-first for all the services. The implementation of this strategy saw the launch of the Practo Search healthcare app of the organization. The app was designed to help the customers in finding a suitable doctor for the patients by gaining detailed information regarding the doctors including their qualifications, remuneration, expertise, and feedback from previous patients who have received treatment from the doctor. This app was made with the integration of SaaS platform with customer offering and gained major significance in the healthcare domain and the company saw a rise in the internet traffic by more than 50%, which was fruitful for the company is generating more conversions from the searches since the users were able to perform more searches over the mobile platform because of the ease and mobility offered by the platform (Roshan, 2017).
Over the course of time, the firm decided to integrate Practo Ray with Practo Search and this resulted in the creation of a healthcare hyperloop that established a holistic environment for healthcare and helped millions of the users to make better informed decisions regarding their healthcare. The firm adopted a VUPIM strategy that focuses on Vision, User, Practeon, Investors and I. The company is making great strides and has been focusing on its global expansion strategy for scaling the business.
A2. Do you believe Practo’s business model can be sustained in the long run? Support your answer with justifying arguments!
Practo has a business model that focuses on the five major aspects of the business. This model is known as the VUPIM model as discussed previously. The model focuses on the vision of the brand that is to better the healthcare experience of the people, the user that is the client case of the firm, the practeon that is the workforce of the firm, the investors who provide the necessary monetary and other resources to the firm, and myself that is the firm itself. The experts in this domain have often referred to this model as the priority matrix of the company that has led the company to make crucial decisions related to the business on the basis of the priority of the company. The growth strategy of the firm was directed towards building an enterprise with a strong network of doctors, hospitals and diagnostic laboratories that would cater to all the healthcare needs of the users.
The company was soon faced with certain challenges that could prove to be a deterrent to the company’s growth in the long run. The firm provided the users with an online platform that was built on the foundations of technological advancement. However, this could prove to be a challenge to the company since many doctors and healthcare professionals might be hesitant to shift to technology for getting clients as they already have a backing of their reputation in their fields of expertise to get clients. However, the company already had a huge clientele that it served even excluding these doctors and healthcare professionals.
Another major challenge faced by the firm was in the ever changing landscape of technology that formed the foundation of the platform provided by the firm. This has led to a strong competition in the market Practo operates in and consequently, a large number of firms commenced operating in this domain and the number of competitors of Practo grew manifold. Qikwell technologies became a major competitor to the company among other competitors such as Savetime and Ziffi (Chauhan and Kumar, 2013). Hence Practo chose an acquisition strategy to oust the competition of Qikwell Technologies and this has been a major boost for the firm as the firm has integrated Qikwell into their services for the hospitals. This enables the company to gain pertinent talented professionals in their team who could provide to be major assets to the company.
The company soon ventured into preventative healthcare as there was much need of the integration of this domain in the business of the company (Gayathry, 2016). The first acquisition of the company in preventative healthcare was Fitho, which was a tech startup focused on fitness. The company went on to acquire Genii Technologies that dealt in product design and development. This proved to be a positive move on the part of the firm since the team of Genii Technologies joined that of Practo and facilitated the foray of Practo into the enterprise landscape with the products for hospitals and diagnostic labs. These acquisitions enabled Practo to hold its position as the leader of the online healthcare market.
The firm was strongly dedicated towards the expansion into the major 35 cities of India and has been successful in doing so. The firm has realised the huge potential of the healthcare sector and has been focused on utilising this opportunity to its advantage. The firm has been trying to get a significant amount of funding from the giant investors such as Google Capital and Yuri Milner and has received capital investments from them. The company has other major investors such as Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners among others and the fundings received by the firm from the investors has helped the firm in embarking on the journey to become one of the largest online healthcare services platforms all over the world.
The overseas expansion strategy of the firm is another prominent feature of the business model of the company and this strategy has been a part of the focus of the firm since 2015 when Practo became the first company from India to become a part of the portfolio of Altimeter Capital by getting $90 million in funding from the organization (Chauhan and Kumar, 2013). These investor firms could help the further expansion of Practo as the firms have the necessary expertise and resources for the scaling of the business at Practo.
Practo entered the market of Indonesia in 2015 and utilised the growing number of internet users in the country as an aid in expansion. The country had been seeing a shift in lifestyle choices as the people became more conscious of healthcare implications and Practo has been able to provide the necessary vessel for the transformation. Consequently, Practo leaders have been aiming to enter the markets of other developing countries and some developed countries such as the Middle East, Brazil, etc. as they can prove to be lucrative markets for online healthcare services. Therefore, it can be concluded that the firm has been able to tackle the challenges faced by it and has been able to use the technological advancement for its advantage and grow into a large platform (Agarwal and Biswas, 2020).
Conclusion
Practo is a leading firm that operates in the online healthcare sector and provides a stable platform to doctors, clinics, diagnostic labs and hospitals to find customers and patients who are looking for doctors or other healthcare services. The platform was initially a startup but soon became a major company and consequently the market leader in the field. The company has faced major challenges such as refusal from doctors to shift into the technological platforms and increasing competition in that sector. However, the company has been able to address those issues and is looking forward to expansion in the global scale.
References
Agarwal, N. and Biswas, B., 2020. Doctor Consultation through Mobile Applications in India: An Overview, Challenges and the Way Forward. Healthcare Informatics Research, 26(2), pp.153-158.
Chauhan, R. and Kumar, A., 2013, November. Cloud computing for improved healthcare: Techniques, potential and challenges. In 2013 E-Health and Bioengineering Conference (EHB) (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
Chauhan, R. and Kumar, A., 2013. Practo Technologies: the online way of life!. Emerald Emerging Markets Case Studies.
Chauhan, R., Kumar, A. and Singh, H., 2015. Lessons from startup for energising online patient care. International Journal of Technology Marketing, 10(2), pp.195-208..
International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences Review and Research, 40(2), pp.266-270.
Jagtap, P., Jagdale, P., Gawade, S. and Javalkar, P.B., 2016. Online Healthcare System Using the Concept of Cloud Computing. International Journal of Scientific Research in Science, Engineering and Technology (ijsrset. com), IJSRSET, 2(2).
Motha, L., Nalini, R., Alamelu, R., Amudha, R. and Badrinath, V., 2017. Health Startups in India-A Progression Towards Development. Research Journal of Pharmacy and Technology, 10(12), pp.4175-4177.
Practo, 2020. About Us | What We Do - Practo. [online] Practo. Available at:
