For many patients, finding the right doctor has traditionally involved asking friends and family, making phone calls, visiting clinics and waiting for appointments. Shashank ND experienced a version of this challenge firsthand and began thinking about how technology could make healthcare discovery and access simpler.
That idea eventually became Practo, a technology company that built a digital platform around doctors, clinics and healthcare services.
A Problem Close to Home
Shashank ND studied engineering at National Institute of Technology Karnataka.
His entrepreneurial journey was influenced by a personal experience involving his father, who was developing a medical device.
Finding doctors and getting information about healthcare providers proved more complicated than expected.
The experience highlighted a larger problem: healthcare information was fragmented, and patients often had limited visibility into the providers available to them.
Starting Practo
Shashank co-founded Practo with Abhinav Lal.
The company began with a focus on helping healthcare professionals manage their practices and connect with patients.
Rather than attempting to solve every healthcare problem at once, the early business concentrated on creating useful technology for doctors and clinics.
This gave Practo a foundation from which it could later build consumer-facing services.
Connecting Doctors and Patients
As the platform developed, patients could use Practo to search for doctors and healthcare providers.
The service brought information that had traditionally been difficult to access into one digital environment.
Users could explore specialties, locations and available services.
For doctors and clinics, digital tools could help with appointment management and patient interactions.
The platform therefore served two sides of the healthcare ecosystem.
Technology Meets a Complex Industry
Healthcare is different from many other consumer industries.
Patients are not simply choosing a product. They are making decisions involving personal information, medical needs and professional services.
That meant Practo had to build a system where accuracy, privacy and reliability were particularly important.
The company expanded its technology offerings to support healthcare providers as well as consumers.
Moving Beyond Appointment Discovery
Practo gradually expanded beyond its original doctor-search and appointment-booking proposition.
Its services included practice-management tools, telemedicine and other digital healthcare features.
The expansion reflected changes in how patients interacted with healthcare.
Instead of treating a doctor’s appointment as a single offline event, technology could support different stages of the patient journey.
The Pandemic Accelerates Digital Healthcare
The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed healthcare behavior around the world.
Patients and doctors increasingly explored remote consultations when in-person visits were difficult.
Telemedicine became more familiar to a much wider population.
For digital healthcare companies such as Practo, this created new demand for online consultations and other remote services.
The experience demonstrated how quickly healthcare habits could change when technology becomes necessary.
Building Trust in HealthTech
One of the biggest challenges in healthcare technology is trust.
Patients need confidence that the information they receive is reliable and that their personal details are handled responsibly.
Healthcare professionals also need tools that fit into existing workflows without creating unnecessary complexity.
For Practo, building a sustainable platform therefore required attention to both technology and the human side of healthcare.
Lessons From the Founder
Shashank ND’s journey offers several lessons for entrepreneurs.
Personal experiences can reveal larger market problems. A frustrating experience with healthcare helped expose a broader challenge.
Start with a focused problem. Practo developed its initial platform around healthcare providers before expanding its services.
Technology must adapt to industry realities. Healthcare requires greater attention to privacy, reliability and professional standards than many ordinary consumer services.
Markets can change quickly. The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital healthcare and expanded the role of telemedicine.
Making Healthcare More Connected
Shashank ND’s journey with Practo illustrates how entrepreneurship can begin by questioning why an everyday process remains unnecessarily difficult.
Finding a doctor, booking an appointment and communicating with a healthcare provider may appear straightforward, but the underlying system involves thousands of independent professionals and organizations.
Practo’s broader mission has been to connect those parts through technology.
The story offers a valuable lesson for founders: some of the strongest technology opportunities exist not in creating entirely new behaviors, but in improving complicated systems that people already depend on every day.