Practo acquires InstaHealth to provide superior healthcare experience to patients Acquisition will strengthen Practo's offering to hospitals.
By Entrepreneur India •
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Practo, an online healthcare platform, today announced the acquisition of Mumbai Angel backed InstaHealth Solutions for $12 million. Insta Health is a leading provider of cutting edge end-to-end cloud based hospital information management solution (HIMS) that powers hospitals across 15 countries in India, South East Asia, Middle East and Africa. Insta was one of the first few partners to come onboard on this program. With this acquisition, Practo will get access to the real-time view of a doctor's availability to enable appointment bookings across 500 hospitals that use Insta Health's products. It will also enable Practo to allow users to access their medical records on its app through integration with HMIS.
"This is the third of several acquisitions we've been evaluating as we continue our mission to help simplify and digitise healthcare around the world and make Practo your health app. I am very pleased to welcome Insta Health's team to Practo. I look forward to working with them to transform the hospital industry globally and provide a great consumer experience by digitising records, removing wait times and queues, simplifying payments and more," said Shashank ND, Founder & CEO, Practo.
The deal further brings to Practo a great product and a talented team of 100 people along with 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's availability across hospitals and departments, instant bookings as well as no waiting time or queues once they reach the hospital. Patients will also be able to access all their health records post their discharge on Practo's platform – either on web or through mobile app.
Commenting on the acquisition, Ramesh Emani, Founder & CEO, Insta Health said, "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 we can together offer superior, comprehensive and integrated solutions for all participants in the healthcare ecosystem across patients, doctors and healthcare providers. 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's team in realising our shared vision of transforming healthcare globally."
Insta Health will operate as a separate division and will continue to be led by Emani. He holds rich experience of over 24 years in building strong software and product teams across various verticals at Wipro. Speaking on the same lines, Rajiv Dadlani , Deal Lead, Mumbai Angels, said, "Ramesh a true visionary. He has steered the company very well under his leadership over the last few years, taking the right decisions and pivoted Insta Health from being a domestic player to building a global platform for hospitals and specialty clinics, an extremely valuable asset in the digital healthcare space,".
Insta Health's platform is used by both standalone and chain of clinics, hospitals and diagnostic labs for automating their clinical, operational and financial processes such as scheduling, registration, out-patient and in- patient management, billing, electronic medical records (EMR), ward and bed management, diagnostics, advanced insurance and lab equipment integration, operation theatre, pharmacy and inventory management, specialty modules like dental, dialysis, IVF, Pediatrics, etc. Some its customers includes, Cloudnine, Deepam Hospitals, MyDentist, DaVita, Skyline Hospital in Manila, NMC Group of hospitals in UAE, and Karen Hospital in Kenya and many more.
Exiting Investors
The acquisition has resulted in a multi-bagger (100 per cent) cash exit for Mumbai Angels, Inventus Capital, Tholons Capital and other investors from Insta Health, with a multiple of 4.22x return on their capital. Commenting on the same lines, Prashant Choksey, Co-founder, Mumbai Angels, said, "It's exhilarating to be in the midst of a profitable cash exit. The whole buzz currently is around large VC rounds and billion dollar valuations. But any seasoned investor who's lived through an investment cycle would agree, that a return of capital is much more important than a notional return on capital".
