Portea forays into wireless devices market, aims to cover 50 cities in next 2 years

Portea Medical, a home healthcare services provider raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Qualcomm Ventures, the venture investment arm of Qualcomm Incorporated. Firstbiz spoke to co-founder and CEO of Portea, Meena Ganesh, to know more of the start-up’s expansion plans and foray into the wireless device segment.

Firstbiz: What are the reasons for raising funds from Qualcomm Ventures? Can you share the amount and stake?

Meena Ganesh: We want to help people manage their health over a period of time through our care plans, especially those suffering from chronic diseases. We believe technology will play a huge role towards this, be it for managing diseases or logistics. When it is a long duration care plan, there is a requirement to capture the health parameters of patients. This is an area where Qualcomm has a huge amount of expertise. Besides, it has also made investments in this space. The patient’s parameters can be seamlessly captured and transferred through Wi-Fi to a central repository where data is monitored and measured to understand patient needs so that the disease is kept under control. Therefore, we see a huge benefit in associating with Qualcomm. However, Qualcomm is not sharing the amount of the raise from QLife Fund, a fund for healthcare companies. It is a continuation of Series A raise we did in December 2013 with Accel and Ventureast.

Can you tell us more about your plans to get into the wireless devices space?

Like I said, one of our big focus is the care plan. This can be done in two ways. We can provide devices to patients so that they can monitor their sugar, blood pressure oxygen saturation, for instance, which needs to be measured multiple times a day. There are other things like ECG, for instance, that need to be measured by clinicians. Whether it’s a patient or clinician, we believe there is a way to do this in a simple, seamless way so that data gets transferred easily to the cloud. This in turn allows us to monitor the progression of the disease/patient. Interventions can be done remotely too, based on the condition of the patient. This method allows us to manage and monitor conditions so as to prevent deterioration of the patients’ health because hospitalization disrupts families. This keeps costs under control and will benefit industry and families of patients too.

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For which diseases are you planning to launch devices?

There are a number of portable/ wearable devices that we are evaluating now like pulse oximeter, portable ECG machines, HbA1c test that checks the glucose level of diabetic patients, hemostat - haemoglobin meter that will help doctors to decide appropriate dosage of Hb injections for anaemic patients whose results are available in five seconds, Beta hCG test for pregnant women, CRP test, TSH test for thyroid disorders, smart watch for fall detection, and smart wrist bands for activity monitoring.

How will technology come into play here?

The Portea platform sits on a geo-fencing network that divides each city into geo fences and helps us to manage and co-ordinate visits of clinicians. A complex back-end algorithm helps us to identify clinicians who are best suited for a particular patient. A number of factors are taken into account such as the geo-location of the customer, preferred time-slot, type of service requested and the clinician’s calendar. All patient requests and clinician locations can be viewed from a central location. Real time updates can be obtained including information when a clinician is running late for any reason.

What will be the business model to weave these devices into your services?

In some cases, devices will be made available to patients for self- measurement. For a few other parameters, the presence of clinical staff is required to use these devices, which will be provided to them. All clinicians are our employees. We expect to be in the field in the next four-six months with these devices and offer services around them.

And Qualcomm’s involvement other than their investment will be…?

Qualcomm has device companies and tools that can help with transmission and management of data. We have access to their portfolio companies. So we will evaluate them and then look at which ones to work with.

How will these wireless devices add value and augment services that Portea provides?

Technology is a core component if we have to provide care plans and scale these services to manage patient parameters. We currently do 20,000 visits a month across 18 cities. Technology will enable us to scale across India. This is a scalable and economical way of managing people’s health. We will pick top eight-10 cities in India where we have a large number of patients and start with them.

Will these devices be only used internally or will they be used / sold to other medical professionals/ institutions in the future?

As of now we are only looking to use them to provide value to our customers.

Do you have any other expansion plans?

We are looking to expand our reach to 50 cities in the next 18-24 months. We are hoping to add a number of verticals. Recently, we added a new service around mother and baby care, oncology, etc. So,we will continue to add verticals to six that we have now.