Twenty-five years in the same room as the problem

I am Prassant Kumar, founder of Caresoft Systems. We build the information system that runs hospitals — admissions, wards, pharmacy, laboratory, billing, discharge, the unglamorous machinery a hospital cannot function without.

I started in 2000, when almost no Indian software company wanted the healthcare sector: long sales cycles, difficult users, thin margins and customers who could not afford to be down for an hour. Twenty-five years later the company has never taken outside capital, and the software runs in more than a thousand hospitals in over twelve countries.

What that gave me is not a market view. It is a very specific kind of knowledge: what a ward clerk does at shift change, why a consultant abandons a system in week three, how a hospital CFO reconciles a day of billing, what breaks when the internet goes down in a district town. Every opinion I have about healthcare technology is downstream of watching that up close, repeatedly, for a quarter of a century.

Today I spend a growing share of my time outside the company — on stage, in boardrooms, with founders, and increasingly with policy groups working on how Indian health data should move. The goal for the next five years is simple to say and hard to do: to be the most useful voice in Indian healthcare technology, and to leave the sector materially more digital than I found it.