Practo, India’s leading integrated healthcare company, has introduced its teleconsultation service in multiple Indian languages.

This initiative will allow online consultation users to choose a doctor who can speak in their preferred language. Currently, this service covers 15 languages – including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada and Bengali – with more to be added soon. With this, Practo is one step closer to breaking down access barriers for 200 million unique users in the future.

After receiving lakhs of user requests for language-specific features on Practo, this was launched as a pilot project earlier this year, with Hindi as the alternate option for users to choose from. 

During this time, 25 per cent of all online consultations on Practo were conducted in vernacular languages, with  Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and Kannada (in that order) emerging as their preferred language(s) for consultation. Around 67 per cent of all vernacular consultations were from users living in non-metro cities. Remarkably, 65 per cent of all vernacular consults were from users aged 60 and above.

Commenting on the new initiative, Siddhartha Nihalani, VP - Product Growth, Practo, said, “In enabling interactions in native languages for online consultations - that undoubtedly enjoys wide acceptance - we hope to be one step closer to turning our vision of building access to quality healthcare into reality.”

The vernacular language support feature will now be available on both Practo app and website. The company is also planning to introduce new interface capabilities to make the doctor-patient interaction more seamless and engaging.