Practo buys healthcare analytics firm Enlightiks

Bengaluru: Healthcare services platform Practo Technologies Pvt. Ltd has acquired Enlightiks Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd, a healthcare analytics solutions firm, in a cash and stock deal.

Established in 2012, with offices in Bengaluru and Charlotte in the US, Enlightiks owns a predictive clinical and computational platform called Querent and uses big data analytics to provide business intelligence to healthcare providers. The company was started by Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur alumnus Vamsi Chandra Kasivajjala, who had earlier worked with Philips India and Religare Technologies among others, along with Shilpa Peri, Venkatesh Pagidimarri, Bas Nair, Shaunak Joshi and Sunil Kondala.

Practo confirmed the development, but did not disclose the terms of the deal. Mint could not ascertain the deal value.

“We sell marketing solutions and software to enterprises. In the second bucket, Enlightiks becomes one of the most important products. Last year, we acquired Insta Health Solutions and Qikwell Technologies Pvt. Ltd. With this portfolio of software products, we complete the suite for healthcare providers,” Practo chief executive Shashank N.D. said.

Practo has been among the most active buyers among large Indian start-ups. Apart from Enlightiks, Qikwell and Insta, it acquired FitHo, a fitness management platform and product outsourcing firm Genii.

Its acquisitions, especially Qikwell and Insta, have not only helped the company enter the enterprise segment—hospitals and clinics—but also opened additional revenue streams for the company.

Enlightiks deploys machine learning and deep learning to service more than 250 hospitals and clinics, which predominantly use its business intelligence service, while some of the clients use predictive analytics to augment revenue and streamline operations.

“For instance, a dashboard is something that everyone sees. Ours is a more dynamic dashboard. Our system helps a chain of hospitals click on its profit and loss at a unit level, department level and procedure level also. They can figure out if one of the variables increases, say doctor’s fees increases by 15%, how will it impact margins, etc. All of those are automatically done,” said Kasivajjala.

“If they say we want to achieve 20% Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) next year, what the system does is it applies machine-learning models with a lot of logic that is built into it and comes back and says these are the six or seven scenarios in which there is a high probability for you to achieve that Ebitda. It is not saying the obvious like cut down your salary,” he added.

The 50-odd engineers at Enlightiks will be absorbed into Practo.

Practo currently claims to aggregate 2 lakh doctors, 10,000 hospitals, 8,000 diagnostic centres and 4,000 wellness and fitness centres in India, Brazil, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Practo is the most well-funded home-grown healthcare technology start-up, having raised about $124 million from the likes of China’s Tencent; Belgian venture capital firm Sofina; Google Capital; Altimeter Capital; Yuri Milner, founder of Russian venture capital firm DST Global; Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners.

At its last fund-raising in August 2015, the company was valued at about $500 million.

In the year ended 31 March, Practo clocked revenue of Rs165.14 crore as against Rs29.73 crore a year earlier. Net sales stood at Rs156 crore. Losses climbed to Rs64.61 crore from Rs12.85 crore a year earlier, Mint reported on 17 November.

About Rs133 crore of sales came from Practo Pte, the Singapore-based company that holds about a 93% stake in Practo Technologies, for providing “software development and support services”, as against Rs23 crore a year earlier. This implies that actual business revenue grew four times to Rs23 crore as against Rs6 crore in FY15.

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Practo earns revenue by selling a practice management and appointment scheduling software for doctors and clinics, as well as a hospital information management solution, all on a software as a service model, apart from a sponsored listing service for hospitals and clinics.

The company does not charge consumers for doctor discovery and scheduling appointments or doctors for listing on Practo.