SIX days after securing additional $90 million (roughly P4.2 billion) in Series C funding led by Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., Practo Pte. Ltd. formally began operating in the Philippines.
With 14 staff in its content team, the company said it will begin selling its proprietary cloud-based health-care management solution Practo Ray. The Bangalore, India-based company, however, would be offering for free its search engine.
The software-as-a-service firm said in a statement on August 20 the search engine allows consumers to search through over 11,000 doctors across all 17 cities in the Greater Manila area, which is over 70 percent of all doctors in this location.
The company said it verifies and lists doctors for free and does not charge consumers or doctors to find, book and receive appointments.
That most number of doctors makes the company’s database the largest in the Philippines.
“Practo’s goal is to list all the health-care professionals in the Philippines,” the company said. It added: “To make sure the data is reliable, Practo’s own team combs through every street and every zone to verify and list all the doctors on Practo for free.”
Practo said consumers can search using doctor’s names and specialization. Consumers can also search symptoms. After getting results of the search, consumers can click through the profile for each professional or establishment to read more details including years of experience, qualifications, affiliations and specializations, as well as see clinic photos. Consumers can also get global positioning system co-ordinates of location for easy turn-by-turn navigation right from within the Practo application, the company said.
The company would generate revenue from its Practo Ray, which would be sold on an annual subscription basis at P2,200 ($47.15) a month. According to Practo, the solution manages a doctor’s schedule, billing and inventory. “It also creates digital health-care records and prescriptions so consumers always have their health-care history available to them right inside the app.”
The company didn’t say if it would also launch Practo Reach in the Philippines, a sponsored listing service for hospitals and clinics and reportedly accounts for about 40 percent of the company’s revenues in India. The company said it would undertake expansion in the next three to six months to completely cover Cebu, Cavite and Batangas.
Image credits: Photo courtesy Practo Pte. Ltd./BusinessMirror