Sehat Kahani is a telehealth startup that aims to democratize healthcare in Pakistan through its network.

Founded in 2017, the startup recently raised $500,000 in seed funding from multiple sources and plans to expand its operations in the coming months.

What Sehat Kahani is trying to do is to create an all female provider network that connects home based female doctors to patients in under-served areas where health is still a dream, through quality tech-enabled solutions.

Also read: Women doctors bring online healthcare to rural Pakistan

Pakistan has a population of 182 million, out of which 51 percent people are deprived of basic healthcare services.

Unfortunately, a huge problem why healthcare is still not accessible in these areas is because of the absence of female doctors. They fall in the hands of what we call in Pakistan the 'Doctor-Bride' phenomena: people want doctors as potential wives, but unfortunately they don’t want them to work, and become home makers instead.

“I’ve seen the disabled healthcare system and I’ve seen what it is like to lose the opportunity to work as a doctor. Hence I knew that I could connect these two dots together and create that bridge between doctors and those patients.”, says co-founder Dr Sara Khuram.

It’s a difficult phenomenon to convince patients that the doctor is not physically present, but is somewhere online sitting at home doing a consultation.

One such example is of a doctor sitting in New Zealand but working in KPK and a doctor from Quetta working remotely in Karachi.

Remote doctors can largely solve the issue of poor healthcare facilities in the rural sector of Pakistan, and also bring female doctors back to the workforce without them having to leave their homes to practice.

This content has been published in partnership with Deutsche Welle (DW).