Practo buys Insta Health for $12M

Leading Asian healthcare platform Practo has announced its acquisition of Insta Health Solutions—a leading provider of cutting-edge end-to-end, cloud-based hospital information management solution (HIMS) that powers hospitals across 15 countries in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa—for $12 million.

Insta will operate as a separate division and will continue to be led by Ramesh Emani, its founder and chief executive officer.

The acquisition brings to Practo a great product, a fantastic team and an expanded global customer base. The acquisition will provide an option to hospitals using Insta’s product to integrate with Practo’s platform and, thus, provide a superior healthcare experience to patients by enabling them to search and easily find information about doctor availability across hospitals and departments, book appointments easily, and avoid waiting times or queues once they reach the hospital for their appointment.

Patients will also be able to access all their health records or post their discharge on Practo, either on the Web or the mobile application.

Insta is used by clinics, hospitals and diagnostic laboratories for automating their clinical, operational and financial processes, such as scheduling; registration; outpatient and in-patient management; billing; electronic medical records (EMR); ward and bed management; diagnostics; advanced insurance and lab-equipment integration; operation theater; pharmacy and inventory management; and specialty modules, like dental, dialysis, IVF, and pediatrics.

The acquisition will help accelerate Practo’s Partner Program, designed to enable HIMS providers around the world to integrate with Practo’s platform to provide consumers a seamless healthcare experience, no matter which hospital they visit. Insta was one of the first few partners to come on board this program.

“This is the third of several acquisitions we’ve been evaluating, as we continue our mission to help simplify and digitize healthcare around the world and make Practo everyone’s health app,” Practo founder and Chief Executive Officer Shashank ND said.

“I am very pleased to welcome Ramesh and the Insta team to Practo. I look forward to working with them to transform the hospital industry globally and provide a great consumer experience by digitizing records, removing waiting times and queues, simplifying payments, and more,” he added.

“Insta is thrilled to join Practo in our quest to enable digital healthcare worldwide. We both share the same passion, vision and commitment to customers in offering great products. We chose Practo over some other options as we felt that, together, we can offer superior, comprehensive and integrated solutions for all participants in the healthcare ecosystem across patients, doctors and healthcare providers,” Emani said.

“Insta will benefit from Practo’s expertise in mobile technology, and their geographic and global presence. I look forward to working with Shashank and the Practo team in realizing our shared vision of transforming healthcare globally,” he added.

Practo currently has 11,000 listed doctors in the Philippines in all 17 cities in the Greater Manila area. Practo has more than 50 people in the Philippine team and is looking to expand that to over 150 by March 2016. In the next three to six months, Practo will continue to grow its presence in the Philippines to cover more areas and ensure that consumers have the best healthcare experience.