Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the team.

Sylvana Sinha: Today we have 450 people. My Chief Medical Officer is an amazing woman. She has been working in healthcare for more than 40 years. She’s an expert in quality management. Her husband was a diplomat, so she’s lived and worked all over the world.

She moved back to Bangladesh 12 years ago. She had been working as the Head of Quality at a large private hospital in Bangladesh. She had gone into retirement and I convinced her to come out of retirement. She has been with us since 2017.

Her deputy, our Medical Director, was our first hire. He’s around my age. He has been working in healthcare management for most of his career. He started out as a surgeon and teaches public health at one of the large universities in Bangladesh.

Our Senior Lab Director ran a lab at Harvard for four years. Our Lab Director was employed by the one internationally-accredited lab in Bangladesh for many years. During my tour in that first year, I had the opportunity to visit his lab and was quite impressed by him.

Our CTO is non-Bangladeshi. He’s Sri Lankan-Brit born and raised in the UK. He had been living in Bangladesh with Telenor. His wife was pregnant with their second child. He fell in love with the business, became an advisor, and joined us as CTO. We recently brought in a Chief Product Officer who is a healthcare entrepreneur himself. He’s an amazing guy. Our Chief Experience Officer is also one of our early hires. He has been with us since the very beginning.

Sramana Mitra: How many clinics do you have now?

Sylvana Sinha: We have one flagship center which is a 10-story building and we have about 40-plus collection points.

Sramana Mitra: In those 40-plus collection points, are there resident doctors?

Sylvana Sinha: No, those are just for sample collections. We’re raising funds right now to build out our own clinics and network.

Sramana Mitra: Anybody who wants to seek help from Praava would have to come to that flagship center?

Sylvana Sinha: Or they can access our doctors by telemedicine. Interestingly, even internationally, we have a lot of Bangladeshi patients who are reaching out to talk to our doctors from Canada, UK, and beyond?

Sramana Mitra: How many doctors are in the system?

Sylvana Sinha: We have about 40 doctors in-house and we have additional 35-plus specialists.

Sramana Mitra: These are all Bangladeshis?

Sylvana Sinha: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: The 440 people that you have, how does that split up?

Sylvana Sinha: The corporate office is about 60 people. Then an additional 40 comprise the sales force. The rest are lab technicians, front-facing workers, and clinic staff.

Sramana Mitra: How many patients are you servicing?

Sylvana Sinha: We’ve served more than 350,000 patients to date.

Sramana Mitra: How much of that has taken you up on the insurance that you’re offering?

Sylvana Sinha: A very small percentage. It’s a very new concept for people to prepay for healthcare services. Even we haven’t been able to focus on the marketing of it. We have seen some uptick of it among our corporate clients. Even in India which is more advanced in development in the healthcare sector, insurance penetration is not there.

Sramana Mitra: It’s terrible. The reason I’m asking you is this may be one of the ways you can get significant venture capital to come in – if you can turn this into a subscription business. What is your plan? In your quest to grow this and distribute it widely, where are you going to grow and how are you going to grow?

Sylvana Sinha: We’d really like to stay focused in Bangladesh – in Dhaka.

Sramana Mitra: Just in Dhaka?

Sylvana Sinha: We want to take over Dhaka and stay focused on that. Bangladesh has an interesting phenomenon. It’s called the density dividend. It’s three times the population density of India. If you can build and scale a brand within Dhaka, it becomes much easier to scale across the country. In the next three years, we’d like to focus on Dhaka and its 25 million population. Then we’d like to go to second-tier cities.

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