First 4Ps (Product, Process, Pricing and People) – Rohan Chakraborty (2401369)

In order to cover the various aspects of the marketing mix (7Ps), we will try and highlight all we have
that we have learnt so far in our course and relate them to how Practo has adopted and executed
each aspect.

Product:
Practo’s product strategy is built around its multi-service platform that caters to two primary
stakeholders or rather two sides of the network: patients and healthcare providers

For Patients (B2C): The following benefits (JTBD) are provided by the Practo app/website –

 Online Doctor Discovery and Appointment Booking: The core offering allows users to
search for doctors, clinics, and hospitals based on specialty, location, and patient reviews.
 Telemedicine Services: Practo provides a platform for online consultations through text,
voice, and video calls with doctors across various specialties.
 Online Pharmacy: Patients can upload prescriptions to order medicines and have them
delivered to their doorstep.
 Diagnostic Services: The platform allows users to book lab tests and health check-ups,
often with the convenience of at-home sample collection.
 Digital Health Records: Practo offers a secure way for patients to store and access their
medical history, prescriptions, and test results in one place.

For Healthcare Providers (B2B):

 Practo Ray: This is a practice management software for doctors and clinics. It helps them
manage appointments, electronic health records (EHR), billing, and patient communications.

 Practo Prime: This is a paid listing and marketing product for clinics and hospitals. It offers
enhanced visibility in search results, a verified profile tag, and features like instant online
booking to improve patient experience and attract new clients.

 Practo Profile: A simple guide for medical practitioners to create a professional digital
presence to connect with patients.

Practo effectively uses the concepts of core and supplementary products in their line of offerings. The
online doctor consultation clearly being their core offering, while supplementary services include
features like scheduling appointments, managing prescriptions, and accessing digital health records.

This approach of creating a critical core service then following it up with supplementary offerings that
are almost complementary to the core service, provide a comprehensive (one-stop-shop) experience
for patients for all their healthcare needs.

Differentiation and Innovation: Practo’s product offerings in and of itself is not difficult to replicate.
Almost anyone can come up with an app which allows patients to connect with doctors, but the
difficulty here is the background work, to setup a network of vey reliable doctors ready to provide
consultation online and telephonic. As the first mover in India, Practo ran this USP of having strong
network effects over its competitors to near perfection such that it levies subscription charges as well
as Transaction charges from both sides of the network to ensure a stable (from subscription) and a
growing (from transactions) source of revenue.
Amongst the more nuanced features and capabilities, Practo has innovated the cloud-based SaaS
software for doctors and clinics, which allows them to maintain electronic medical records, handle
billing and accounting, and analyze their practice's performance. This too is replicable as any other
technology is, but the positive impact it had on the onboarding practitioners when it was first launched
cannot be replicated.
Process:
To understand the process of a online healthcare service provider like Practo, we will have to
understand the user journey as well as what goes on parallelly in the background of the internal
operations to make it all possible. We can best understand this using a service blueprint, as shown
below:

The red warning signs are areas of the servicescape where failure can happen due to the app itself,
and yellow warning sign is due to the failure from the FLE.

Demand-Capacity management: Practo needs to balance the demand-capacity of their business in

several aspects, such as the increasing new user database and healthcare records using a flexible
cloud-storage service, but here we will discuss regarding their primary concern, the number of doctors
available on their application (capacity) v/s the requests for their respective appointments by the
patients (demand).

As ironic as it might seem, Practo’s business model manages demand to fit the capacity. The doctors
enlisted on the practo app are allowed to set their availability and patients can book appointments for
specific time slots. The AI-enabled search feature and doctor recommending system on the practo
app utilizes this philosophy to recommend doctors who have more bandwidth and more available
time-slots for online consultation. Since geographical location is not a constraint for online
consultation, demand can easily be fit into the slots of available capacity without using practices like
dynamic pricing.

Failure, Recovery, and Complaining Behaviour: The service blueprint helps identify points where
service can fail, such as a doctor being late for a consultation or a technical issue with the video call.
Practo's recovery process includes a customer support team to help reschedule or find another
doctor, and a feedback system to log complaints. Practo also follows an automatic refund policy for
failure of online consultation or the consultation not leading to a conclusive diagnosis. The
unresponsive doctors also get penalized by the app by disabling the doctor’s ability to accept new
consultation requests if they have unanswered follow-up queries for more than 24 hours.
Pricing:
Practo's pricing strategy is a mix of models, addressing both consumers and healthcare providers. As
for the simplistic answer to how are prices fixed by Practo, the consulting fees are not directly fixed by
Practo. In fact, they are almost in all cases fixed by the doctor or healthcare provider themselves,
keeping in mind the platform listing charges and commission that Practo stands to gain from their
services. While they don’t term it exclusively as commission, this is how it is usually charged:

 From doctors and clinics:

o One-time technology fee to clinics and hospitals when a patient uses their platform
to book an appointment.
o Subscription Fee like Practo Ray for practice management which involve monthly
fees
o Visibility boost fees, to have better visibility on the Practo search platform
o Advertising and sponsored listing fees
o Partnership commission from pharmacies or clinics for refferals.
 From patients:
o Platform development fee, this platform fee can be the higher of 20% of the online
consultation fees and Rs. 50
o Practo Plus and Practo Prime subscription fees

Cost Determination: Practo's costs are largely determined by its business model. As an asset-light
platform, the costs borne by the organization are primarily variable. These include technology costs,
marketing, and advertising and partnership expenses. The human element, particularly for customer
support and a sales team to onboard new providers, also represents a significant cost.

Peculiar Business Model: Practo uses what I would like to coin as “semi-freemium”, because as far as
discovering the app and its features and booking an appointment is concerned, are free but to avail
any actual value from the platform, the patient must pay the relevant fees of the platform as well as
the healthcare provider. But it is freemium nonetheless by the traditional definition. The platform's use
of transaction-based pricing for its core services is also a key feature, as revenue is directly tied to
usage. The use of subscription models for both patients and providers is also a unique aspect,
demonstrating how Practo attempts to secure predictable, recurring revenue streams from both sides
of its platform. This approach is a peculiar pricing model for the healthcare industry, which has
traditionally relied on fee-for-service models. This can be considered a testament to the network
strength of a popular platform like Practo.

People:
Employees' Role: Practo's employees include not only its internal staff but also the network of doctors,
clinics, and support staff. These individuals are the ones who deliver the core service, and their quality
and performance directly impact the customer's experience. As "boundary spanners," doctors and
other healthcare providers interact directly with customers, representing the brand and delivering the
promise that Practo makes of accessible, effective, and affordable healthcare. Practo also has to
manage its "gig workers", such as the delivery personnel for its pharmacy and lab services. Some of
the last-mile delivery services are handled by their “partner” pharmacies as well as they have their
own select fleet of delivery personnel.

Hiring and Onboarding: Although Practo doesn’t follow any extraordinary philosophy when it comes to
hiring new employees, there is an inclination towards hiring fresh and young talent for most of its non-
managerial job roles, especially the FLE (front-line employees) such as the customer-service
personnel and delivery partners. The onboarding process includes initial orientation, functional
training, and the use of the Practo Pro app. There is also mention of a mandatory training process for
some roles that requires watching videos, reading guidelines, and taking quizzes. But it is important to
note that their most important FLE of them all, are the doctors.

How Practo hires doctors: In their early days, Practo went from clinic-to-clinic offering them free listing
on their platform to onboard a reliable network of doctors across India. As of now, Practo has over 1
lakh doctors on their platform. Now the process of onboarding new doctors is much more systematic
and organized, where they have a dedicated team for background verification check of all the doctors,
before the training team guides them through the healthcare provider side of the app.

Customer Participation: Practo must actively manage its customers to ensure a smooth service. One
of the main reasons for this is usually their customer base not only includes tech-savvy millennials,
but more often than not it includes elderly patients who are not so well-acquainted with technology.
This includes:

Education and Training: Providing clear instructions and a user-friendly app interface to ensure
patients know how to book appointments, upload prescriptions, and use the telemedicine feature
correctly.

Encouraging Positive Behaviour: The review system encourages customers to provide constructive
feedback, which helps other users make informed decisions.

Sources:
https://www.weekday.works/company/practo