Sehat Kahani's telehealth clinics bring Pakistan's women doctors back to work
Sehat Kahani, the Karachi telehealth company, links women doctors who left medicine after marriage with underserved patients by video. A federal digital clinic and a Harvard case study followed in 2026.
Sehat Kahani is a Karachi telehealth company that connects women doctors working from home with patients in places that have no doctor to see. The doctors are often women who stopped practising after marriage. In April 2026, AFP spoke to one of them, Saniya Jafri, a 43 year old mother of three in Karachi who gave up cardiology after she married. "I did not want to choose long working hours and be away from home for a long time," she told the agency. Now she consults online from her house.
Her story is the company's thesis. According to AFP, around 70,000 of Pakistan's 370,000 registered doctors are women who are listed but not working, citing medical associations. Sehat Kahani's bet is that a screen, a nurse and a flexible shift can turn that idle workforce into primary care, and in 2026 it has two large pieces of validation: a Harvard case study and a federal government clinic.
The doctor bride problem and how Sehat Kahani began
Pakistan's medical colleges enrol women in large numbers, yet many never practise. Pioneers Post reported in 2020 that more than 70 per cent of medical students were female but only 23 per cent practised after graduating, and it cited a Medical Council of Pakistan estimate that half of female doctors drop out. The label for this is the doctor bride, a woman whose medical degree helps her marry well and then stays in a drawer.
“Everyone wants to show doctor brides as a trophy, but then they also want them to stay at home”
Dr Sara Saeed Khurram knew it from inside. Pioneers Post tells how she saw classmates leave medicine after marriage, then stopped practising herself. After moving cities with her first daughter and suffering postpartum depression, she began trying to find a way to bring women doctors back. She started by running Skype consultations for patients in Karachi's Sultanabad from her home in Lahore. With Dr Iffat Zafar Aga, she won a startup competition and $25,000 from CRDF Global. Their first telemedicine clinic opened in Karachi's Model Colony on 11 May 2015, run with a nurse, Nur Tabinda. ProPakistani and Wikipedia date the company itself to 2017, and Wikipedia describes it as a for profit spin off of doctHERs.
How the e health clinic model works and who pays
The clinic is deliberately plain. A nurse sees the patient first, takes measurements and sets up a video call with a doctor in another city. A study published in 2025 on six clinics in rural Sindh, which enrolled 455 mother and child pairs between April and June 2025, noted that the nurses speak Urdu and regional languages, and that a head office in Karachi supervises data and quality.
The economics, as described in 2020, were thin by design. Pioneers Post reported that clinics charged 50 to 100 rupees a patient and had to see about 350 patients a month to break even. Revenue was about 60 per cent earned and 40 per cent grants. Whether that mix has moved since is not public. The company sells a corporate product that gives employees and their families round the clock cashless access to doctors, online medicine delivery and claims management. It also runs a consumer app that offers home lab tests and medicine delivery.
The numbers vary with the source and the year, which is common for a company this long established. Arab News said the app reached over 310 cities and towns in December 2023, while ProPakistani said 350. ProPakistani counted 62 clinics and Startup.pk put it at more than 65 in April 2026, while AFP, in the same month, cited 80. For corporate customers ProPakistani reported more than 800 companies served in 2023, whereas Startup.pk in 2026 said more than 110 corporate clients. They may be counting different things, and the company has not explained the gap.
The $2.7 million Series A and a government clinic
In December 2023 Sehat Kahani said it had raised $2.7 million, describing itself as the first all women led Pakistani company to raise a Series A of that size. Amaanah Circle, a Singapore health tech fund led by Dr Razi Yousuf, led the round. Epic Angels, a women only investor collective, Cross Fund, USAID's Investment Promotion Activity, Augmentor, the Impact Investment Exchange and the Elahi group also invested. The company said it would spend the money on decision support systems, precision medicine tools and predictive AI models, and Aga said it planned to expand to other countries. ProPakistani reported the GCC as a target.
By the company's own account, growth averaged 141 per cent a year over three years, and it had delivered more than 2.6 million consultations. It also said that it had a network of more than 7,500 healthcare professionals. These are company figures, as is the claim that consultations grew fivefold in the period after the pandemic.
On 6 January 2026, the larger prize came. Pakistan's Ministry of National Health Services opened what a government press release described as the first paperless, telemedicine enabled Basic Healthcare Unit under its federal digitalisation programme, at Gokina in Islamabad, together with Sehat Kahani. Patients register digitally, speak to doctors and specialists by video, have records and prescriptions stored electronically and use an integrated pharmacy system, while nurses on site handle triage and follow ups. Federal minister Syed Mustafa Kamal said, "Through telemedicine, we are committed to filling Pakistan's healthcare gaps." Dr Iffat Zafar Aga, the company's cofounder and chief operating officer, called the centre a model for scalable digital healthcare that could be expanded across Pakistan. The release gave no numbers on patients, cost or a rollout timeline. For a company that began in a single Karachi clinic, a federal ministry as a partner is a new kind of backing.
What it means for Pakistan's women doctors and what could go wrong
Startup.pk reported in April 2026 that Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health published a case study in January 2026, titled Sehat Kahani: Digital Health Transformation in Pakistan, by Bukhtawar Azhar, Che L. Reddy and Professor Rifat Atun. The article says the case covers the founding story, pivots, the pandemic response and expansion plans for other low and middle income countries.
The risks are real. A government clinic is a single site, and public programmes depend on budgets and ministers who change. The company's clinics need patient volume at very low fees, and its growth depends on a supply of doctors that must be kept engaged. Khurram told Pioneers Post the biggest challenge in the early years was to be taken seriously by stakeholders because the company is female led. AFP's reporting points to another that has not gone away: Khurram told the agency that most of her medical school cohort left work one by one, facing pressure from in laws to focus on the home. Telemedicine can only reactivate a doctor whose family agrees to it.
There is also a question of audit. Almost every number in this feature is a company statement, and the most recent financing is nearly three years old. What can be said is that the model has travelled from Skype consultations to a federal health ministry clinic in 2026, and that the doctors it reactivated are real people with stories like Jafri's. Whether it can pay for itself without grants is the question the next financing, or the next round of disclosures, will have to answer.
Reported from the company's statements and coverage in AFP via Arab News, Arab News Pakistan, ProPakistani, Startup.pk, Pioneers Post, the BMJ Paediatrics Open study and the Press Information Department.
