How I Helped Overhaul Bangladesh's Healthcare, One Patient at a Time

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0:56Sylvana Quader Sinha:Sylvana Khatharsinha is a Bangladeshi-American lawyer and entrepreneur. In 2018, she launched Prava Health to address the critical need for quality health care in Bangladesh. Since its founding, Prava Health has served over half a million patients, and it's become one of the world's fastest growing emerging market health care providers. I had worked in emerging and frontier markets for my whole career and knew sort of academically and professionally that Bangladesh was one of the fastest growing economies in the world. It struck me that despite all of this progress, you know, 170 million people, a middle class of 40 million, there was no amount of money that could afford you access to high quality health care.

1:34The problem was massive. There needed to be something different introduced. And so if you can really build a brand and scale it, there is tremendous financial reward for that as well. And the impact opportunity was very clear. As I talked to patients, they just didn't trust the health care system. Every day you have thousands of Bangladeshis and every year billions of dollars that were leaving the country to access health care abroad. Together, all of these things presented a really compelling opportunity to me. So at Brava, what we're trying to do is really focus on building that relationship between the doctor and the patient.

2:10This is a country where the average amount of time doctors spend with patients is 48 seconds. At Brava, we guarantee 15 minutes. This is also a country where at the time that we entered the market, there were literally only four international standard labs for a country of 170 million people. Today there are seven. On a per capita basis, the United States has 3400 times that level of international standard labs. And so patients also can't trust that when they go to a lab, that they're going to get a quality result. We have built a lab that is set up according to international standards and is, again, one of the seven international standard labs.

2:51I think investing in building trust, it's not just something that we do because it feels good. It's actually a business strategy. What we've seen over time is by investing in those relationships, word of mouth marketing has become our most compelling touch point in terms of marketing. Our customer acquisition cost is lower than it's ever been. Trust is such a complex thing, but it really comes to earning it one patient at a time. You have to be based where you're building your company. You have to understand your target, your target consumer. And there's no way to do that sitting really far away.

3:25For us, for example, in Bangladesh, a lot of people have smartphones. Probably 100 million people have smartphones. But some of them might have like a simplistic version of a smartphone called a feature phone, which can have only four or five apps on it, right? When we're building tools to help with remote care management, we have built them for Facebook Messenger because we don't want our patients to have to download a whole other app. All of these levels of understanding are impossible to glean without being on the ground. All of my learnings taught me that the only truly sustainable form of development is private sector development.

4:02It was really important that I built a business that could stand the test of time and create jobs and live on its own beyond a charity. 80 % of venture dollars go to companies headquartered in New York, Massachusetts and California. And so that's a reality that I think is unfortunate when the only places you are seeing economic growth are in emerging markets. Banaladish posted 7 % growth last year. Emerging markets are still considered by a lot of the world as places more deserving of charity than investments. I can't tell you how many investors have said to me, wow, it's such an incredible company.

4:37I wish I could just make a donation. You know, I'm just not ready to make an investment in Banaladish. I think a lot of that is really educating people on the opportunity that this market presents. It's grown faster over a longer period of time than even China. I think Banaladish suffers to some extent a marketing problem And so a lot of my fundraising involves educating people on the market.

5:24exact same time. That's all systems down and new snap judgment mini series from KQED. Tap to listen now.