Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the pricing model?

Sylvana Sinha: We like to say we are offering more value for money. We price at market. It’s in between the fancy private hospitals and the free and affordable care. To see a doctor, it’s less than $8. To see a specialist might cost $12 to $15. We acquire patients through consultations or through the pharmacy. We upsell them to longer-term patients through diagnostic testing and health checks. The most profitable part of the business is diagnostics testing.

Sramana Mitra: There is no real insurance system to talk about in Bangladesh?

Sylvana Sinha: Correct. We have introduced an outpatient insurance product which is our bet on value-based care. You pay a flat rate for unlimited access. The price point for that starts at $40 a year and goes all the way up to $350 a year. Even the cheapest plan allows you to come see a doctor every day of the year.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the digital aspect of your story.

Sylvana Sinha: We brought Bangladesh its first patient app which we launched in our first year of operations. We brought Bangladesh the first fully-integrated hospital information system. Initially, the patient app was focused on appointment bookings and medical records. Most patients in our part of the world are carrying their medical records around in bags. The Praava record exists in the app.

If you bring us that bag before Praava, we’ll scan and store the record for you to provide continuity of care and also to provide the provider with the full history. We always had a vision for rolling out additional digital products like telemedicine and e-pharmacy.

When COVID hit in 2020, we had to prepone the launch of everything. We rolled out telemedicine in March of 2020. We were the first private provider to partner with the government on its free telemedicine hotline. We rolled out that e-pharmacy in May of 2020. That summer, we built a tool for remote management of COVID.

All of those digital products are being built into a patient super app, which will be built later this year. It will be a one-stop-shop for all your remote and virtual care needs in the same way that our physical infrastructure is a one-stop-shop for your outpatient needs. On your phone, you will be able to access all of our virtual products.

Sramana Mitra: This is a lot of technology that, I assume, you haven’t built from scratch.

Sylvana Sinha: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What technologies have you integrated to provide the solution?

Sylvana Sinha: We purchased a vendor solution for our hospital information system from Dubai. We took so much risk in the early days. I didn’t want to take the risk of building software. We have started building our own software now. The patient super app is our own proprietary product.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh
1 2 3 4 5