Digital healthcare platform Practo has appointed Cijo George as vice president of Artificial Intelligence, strengthening its leadership bench as the company deepens its technology investments and expands globally.
Cijo George will lead Practo’s AI charter across the platform, working closely with product, engineering and clinical teams to enhance how artificial intelligence is embedded into care navigation, provider tools and platform intelligence. He will report to co-founder and CEO Shashank ND.
The appointment comes at a crucial stage for Practo, which is scaling operations in India while expanding its footprint in international markets, including the United Arab Emirates and the United States.
Deepening AI Integration Across Care Delivery
In his new role, Cijo George will focus on integrating AI more deeply into how patients discover and access healthcare services, while enabling providers to deliver care with greater accuracy, reliability and consistency at scale.
Shashank ND said “for the last 17 years, we have been building deep healthcare intelligence across patients, doctors, clinics and outcomes. AI unlocks the full potential of this data, helping patients get better outcomes and enabling doctors with insights that can genuinely improve care delivery. Cijo brings exceptional depth in building real-world AI platforms, and his belief in using AI to drive meaningful impact strongly resonates with our purpose.”
Cijo George said Practo’s scale and longitudinal healthcare data present a unique opportunity to build impactful AI systems.
“Practo operates at unmatched scale and has built deep healthcare data across patients, providers and outcomes over many years. Combined with its position as a neutral platform across the ecosystem, this creates a powerful foundation to build AI systems that can meaningfully improve health outcomes at scale,” he said.
Two Decades of AI and Platform Experience
Cijo George brings nearly two decades of experience across machine learning, AI platforms and product-led engineering. Prior to joining Practo, he held senior leadership roles at Observe.AI, where he worked on large-scale production AI systems for global enterprises.
Earlier, he led Platform & AI at Belong.co, focusing on search and personalisation in the HR technology domain, and was part of the Advanced Technology Group (CTO Office) at NetApp, working on machine learning and data science approaches for distributed systems. He holds a Master’s degree in High Performance Computing from the Indian Institute of Science.