India’s largest medicalised homecare group expands to South East-Asia after IFC funding
Portea Medical, India’s largest medicalised homecare group has just expanded to Malaysia and is actively looking at other South East Asian markets, linking up to hospitals, labs and potentially insurers. The group provides nursing, primary and rehabilitation care to patients in their homes. We talk to Portea CEO Meena Ganesh.
This year alone, Portea raised $45.6m from venture capital and institutional investors Accel, IFC, Qualcomm Ventures and Ventureast. The group works with an increasing number of partners and might soon sign a deal with Indian insurers.
“Our immediate priority is to grow our Malaysian branch. But we’re very interested in another 3 or 4 markets in South East Asia with similar demographics and requirements,” says Ganesh.
Portea intends to offer a fairly comprehensive offer of services in Malaysia, similar to its Indian base.
The group benefits from a wide range of partnerships in India, sometimes as platforms for referrals. It says it wants to operate on a similar model in Malaysia, but has not given details on the companies it would work with.
Revenues from partner hospitals stand at around 30% of the total in India, with B2C constituting 50%. Large private hospital chains such as Manipal Hospitals, Fortis and Columbia Asia refer their patients to Portea for post-hospitalisation care.
Portea also works with labs in collecting samples and sending them for testing. The group refused to give further details on which companies were involved.
Geographic expansion is not the only short-term plan for Portea. “We have been approached by several large insurance groups regarding new products targeting long-term care needs. Expect to hear something in the next 3 to 6 months,” says Ganesh.
The PMI sector is not very well developed in India for most conditions, let alone elderly care and homecare for which patients rely on a small pension and financial help from family members.
Elderly care is set to boom. Portea says there are 120m people over 65 years old in India, 8% of the total population. With life expectancy increasing, the duration of chronic disease management doubling in recent years, and generations living separately, there is a greater need for elderly care that is so far unmet. By 2050, the proportion of over-60s will rise by more than fourfold to 324m, a fifth of the total population, and the over-80s eightfold to 48m.
And Portea is recruiting. It currently employs 3,170 people, mainly nurses and nurse attendants; and it is aiming to recruit 5,000 more in the next few years, out of which 50% will be nursing attendants and 10% physiotherapists. Each staff member conducts 5-6 visits per day, or 60,000 overall per month across 24 cities.
According to Ganesh, the unpopularity of nursing homes means there is a very large market for homecare. Nursing homes are seen as taboo and unacceptable treatment for aged parents. Despite the emergence of ‘retirement communities’ for the relatively independent elderly, she says the demand for residential care is small. Still, she is already working in collaboration with some them.
“We do provider medical services in retirement communities, but we do not see growth in this sector. We want to remain focus on homecare, post-operative care and chronic disease management,” says Ganesh.
She expects the company to be three times bigger this year compared to 2014.
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