Praanno

Praanno is a digital healthcare tool providing remote COVID and chronic disease care management services to the Bangladeshi public.

Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Praava Health - Sylvana Q. Sinha

During the pandemic, patients and healthcare workers in Bangladesh have been exposed to COVID when positive patients make unnecessary visits to hospitals for care, despite the fact that 80% of COVID cases do not require hospitalisation (source: CDC), and could be managed entirely from home. Bangladesh has had 138M COVID cases to date, with cases surging to new peaks since March 2021, making alternatives to in-person care more pressing than ever.

These unnecessary hospital visits often arise due to lack of education by patients, whose first course of action is to visit a hospital, and instead could be served by primary care facilities that can provide accurate and trusted information to the general public, and support COVID positive patients to manage their symptoms remotely.

Praanno aims to funnel more patients to at-home means of care for COVID to avoid unnecessary visits to the hospital, empowering patients with knowledge, and providing them with remote healthcare services. Praanno has additional applications outside of COVID by presenting patients with chronic disease an alternative to regular in-person visits that may be unnecessary to manage chronic symptoms.

The target audience for our solution is the Bangladeshi public. Our focus is immediately on those in and around Dhaka (population 21M), with the intention to then rollout more broadly across Bangladesh (population 170M). 

In the short term, we seek to support them in managing COVID symptoms and vaccine management and in the long-term with managing symptoms of chronic disease.

Based on the public health concept of active and passive surveillance, the audiences for Praanno’s COVID management services are:

1. COVID+ patients
2. Suspected COVID+ patients
3. High risk populations
4. Family members of people into categories 1, 2, and 3.
5. Medical professionals treating people in categories 1, 2, and 3.

Our current understanding of our user needs come from experience working with our 175K strong patient base at Praava Health. We have piloted our solution with existing patients at Praava for early insights into Praanno's impact.

• Praanno itself will be a free service for patients to use to track their symptoms and will help decongest the strained public health system in Bangladesh by avoiding unnecessary hospital visits and decreasing the risk of exposure to COVID-19. 

• In the long-term, Praanno's chronic disease services will help patients and doctors more closely manage long-term conditions, leading to decreased cost of care over patient lifetimes, and better patient outcomes.

An unchecked COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh could lead to extreme mortality due to high rates of poverty and insufficient access to quality healthcare. A UN memo projects that the pandemic could result in up to 2M deaths in Bangladesh, with patients left untreated due to “a complete saturation of the health system early in the epidemic.”

Praanno will give Bangladeshis the tools to safely identify the care they need without having to take unnecessary trips to a hospital. Those who live in more remote areas of Bangladesh will have the ability to better understand if they need to make a trip to urban centers for care.

Praanno's immediate focus in Year 1 will be on scaling the user base in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, by first engaging the customer base through Praava's clinics and other medical services, and then drawing on existing partnerships to scale our customer base more broadly throughout Bangladesh. 

Throughout the rest of the Year 1 and into Year 2, Praanno will address COVID symptom management only. From Year 2 onwards (depending on the COVID situation in country), Praanno will have potential applications in vaccination management and chronic disease management, as part of a long-term effort to alleviate burden on a saturated national health system in Bangladesh.

We estimate the potential scale of impact in the Dhaka metro area to be ~8M, and in broader Bangladesh to be ~71M. Detail below.

• Dhaka metro area: Projected total ~15M total COVID+ cases, with 10M being symptomatic. Of those 10M, 8M are addressable COVID+ patients suffering mild symptoms who would benefit for symptom management and vaccination support.
• Broader Bangladesh: Projected 133M total COVID+ cases, with 89M being symptomatic. Of those 89M, 71M are addressable COVID+ patients suffering mild symptoms who would benefit for symptom management and vaccination support.

Initial impact will be measured primarily by the following goals:

• Reduction in the number COVID cases requiring hospitalization for Praanno users

• Increase in the numbers of COVID cases who recovered whilst staying at home

• Agreement from healthcare professionals that Praanno provides the information they need to provide care for COVID patients

Initial pilot results show progress against our impact goals:

• Prevent clogging of healthcare system: 0 hospitalizations in pilot group of Praanno users vs. 6 hospitalizations in control group

• Provide ongoing medical advice to quarantined patients and family: 89% of pilot patients successfully recovered at home vs. 59% of control group

• Provide clear standards of care to medical professionals: Majority of doctors agreed that Praanno provided the information they needed to provide high-quality care to their COVID positive patients

Support family members of COVID positive patients: Families included in follow-up calls; patients shared Praanno guidance and resources with family members

• Cost / resources to develop - Praava Health is focused on many products, of which Praanno would be one. Tech resources are at capacity, particularly with the recent COVID surge. We are currently addressing this through more hiring, applying to different grants, leveraging 3rd party infrastructure, and engaging top talent in engineering-focused universities / graduate programs to increase our capacity

• Education gap of target population: 80M of Bangladesh's 170M population has smartphones, but populations are not necessarily tech savvy. Telemedicine is also a relatively new innovation within Bangladesh. We hope to combat that through more education / easy to follow tutorials on the platform itself

• Cultural relationship between Bangladeshis and healthcare: Bangladeshis don’t trust their healthcare system, and many who can afford it would rather find care abroad than trust either public or private systems. We can leverage Praava Health's existing relationship and good will from being the first private provider to conduct COVID tests, as well as being an innovator in patient-centric care.

1. WEF private sector constituency

2. Bangladesh diagnostic centre owners association

By applying to the Trinity Challenge, we hope to gain the publicity, funding and support which will enable us to scale Praanno beyond Dhaka to other cities in Bangladesh, supporting us to achieve our target of serving 1.6 million patients by 2027 - and ultimately across more emerging markets worldwide.