Title: Lessons from startup for energising online patient care

Authors: Roma Chauhan; Amit Kumar; Harjit Singh

Addresses: IILM Graduate School of Management, Greater Noida, India ' IILM Graduate School of Management, Greater Noida, India ' Business Administration Department, Galgotia University, Greater Noida, India

Abstract: Practo Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup was established in 2008. 'Mother is the need of invention' was the compassion behind the creation of Practo. Shashank N.D, CEO, Practo Technologies Pvt. Ltd., went through a difficult scenario of the present day Indian Healthcare System. Shashank was consulting doctors in India for his father's medical treatment. He was not satisfied with the treatment and was keen to seek alternate advice regarding his father's illness. He started scanning documents for e-mailing to the doctor's overseas for their expert opinion. It took him few weeks to get all the reports and medical documents ready in the electronic format. Doctors also expected him to prepare his father's medical history so that they could work on opinion building very closely after going through the patient's records. This case highlights the scenario of Indian healthcare system that made young entrepreneurs to rigorously innovate and bring social change. This case explores the exciting journey of Indian healthcare transformation with technology implementation. The cloud-based healthcare system was developed to handle felicitously the needs of doctors and patient across the country. This case illustrates the potential of cloud-based healthcare systems and concerns to be managed in the coming years by startups.

Keywords: healthcare services; online services; health cloud; software as a service; SaaS; m-health; mobile healthcare; innovation; entrepreneurship; strategy; social transformation; startups; online patient care; e-healthcare; electronic healthcare; India; cloud computing; healthcare technology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTMKT.2015.068599

International Journal of Technology Marketing, 2015 Vol.10 No.2, pp.195 - 208

Published online: 06 Apr 2015 *

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