[100 Emerging Women Leaders] Priya Prakash is helping curb non-communicable diseases among children

Obesity for Priya Prakash ran in the family. All through her childhood and adolescence, Prakash was bullied relentlessly for being overweight. Her classmates at school teased her for ‘taking up too much space’ and sports teams were never a place for her.

Growing up in a family that didn’t encourage physical activity, Prakash coped through the stress by eating; her favourite parathas, junk food, and chips almost every other day. 

As she entered her teenage years, she developed severe body image issues. “It wasn’t until I reached college that I decided to break the cycle,” says Prakash, CEO and Founder of HealthSetGo, a healthcare enterprise working with schools.

Prakash joined a cross fitness gym in Gurugram, and three years later, on the direction of her coach, inadvertently participated in and won silver at a state-level weightlifting championship. At that moment, she knew her mission was in helping other children going through the same challenges as she did. 

“The problem was far greater than I imagined, because India had one of the world’s highest burdens of lifestyle-related, non-communicable diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and cancer,” Prakash tells HerStory. 

“They had to be traced back to childhood; through prevention by early detection.” 

In 2016, Prakash started HealthSetGo Education in Gurugram to offer a large-scale health programme for schools. It focuses on three key aspects--annual health checkups, an accidental insurance of Rs 1 lakh for every student in the programme, and education on nutrition, mental health, and menstrual hygiene with inclusion of learning material from international healthcare organisations. All this is offered at a starting price of Rs 250 per student.

Over the last six years, HealthSetGo Education has worked with 300+ private schools and at the city level with governments, impacting 500,000+ students and parents. 

But it wasn’t yesterday that her idea became scalable.

Catching them young

After graduating in Mathematics Honours from Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi, Prakash joined a financial firm as an analyst, parallelly going through her personal fitness journey.

“My own health breakthroughs nudged me to delve deeper into ways to help other children and young adults overcome their health battles,” she says.

Her research led to the discovery that many schools did not focus on health, nor did they have basic facilities such as a medical room. Even if they did, they didn’t have regular health checkups despite having sufficient funds. 

“Most often, diseases happen to adults. In children, they start off as a dental problem, a harmless stomach pain, blurred vision, or vitamin deficiencies. These are usually conditions that parents can easily oversee, or not take seriously amidst their busy schedules today,” says Prakash.

A 2021 study coordinated by the Indian Council of Medical Research-National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research with 10 implementing research institutes and organisations across India in urban and rural areas said 25.2% of 1,531 adolescents showed insufficient levels of physical activity; 6.2% were overweight, and 1.8% were obese. Two-thirds of those surveyed reported being imparted health education on non-communicable diseases and risk factors in their schools/colleges.

Seamless interventions through data

After countless interviews with several school managements, Prakash found one principal, who was sold by her idea of an annual health programme. She encouraged Prakash to start with a health checkup for her students, following which, Prakash got a team of doctors on board--a dentist, physician, eye specialist, and paramedic, who checked over 800 students.

“But in the end, I was left with 800 hard copies of prescriptions containing their observations and further treatment plans. They were all illegible and confusing. I couldn’t give this pile of paper to parents or teachers,” says Prakash. “I decided that what I’m creating would be tech-enabled, data-centric and paperless,” she adds.

Today, HealthSetGo Education has an application platform, where every doctor can record their observations on an app. These are then transferred on to an online health report that parents and schools can access seamlessly.

An important decision that had to be made while building HealthSetGo Education was whether to impact a few thousand children with a comprehensive healthcare programme to reverse their diabetes, obesity, or other lifestyle -related challenges, or a 100 million children with a standardised healthcare programme at highly affordable rates.

“We chose the latter, since our broad goal was to create a cultural shift and enable affordability in preventive healthcare for children,” says Prakash.

As part of a newly- launched programme, HealthSetGo has included vaccination of children in schools, and wants to focus on mental health. 

“A great time for women entrepreneurs”

Prakash, who is a recipient of the Cartier Women's Initiative Award 2019, says, avenues have opened up for women in the form of government schemes and accolades, creating a conducive environment for women thought leaders and entrepreneurs.

“This is a golden age for women entrepreneurs,” says Prakash. “Some of these provisions, even if they are tokenistic, are a part of a larger movement for change that wants to tap into the talent of women.

“I see this as a change of tides towards the right direction.”