After education, healthcare is next stop for serial entrepreneur K Ganesh

Krishnan and Meena Ganesh are arguably one of the most prolific entrepreneurial couples in India today.

Their latest venture, Portea Medical, started in 2013 , is aimed at filling a gap in the healthcare space, by providing technology-based home healthcare services for geriatric, chronic and post-operative care patients.

But the IIM-Calcutta alumni pair has made a name for themselves in other industries before turning to healthcare.

“We began in the early 1990s, before the term ’entrepreneur’ was used in India,” Krishnan Ganesh, 52, said in a telephone interview. “At that time we only had ‘businessmen’ and ‘business’ meant a factory, land and the like.”

Together, they have taken on and successfully conquered various spaces.

In 1990, Ganesh promoted IT&T, one of India’s first multi-vendor IT service and support companies in the hardware maintenance sector. What started out as an enterprise with an initial capital of Rs 17,000 wound up becoming, in 13 years, a 300-employee strong company that was acquired by US-based iGate in 2003 for Rs 30 crore.

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Next up was the BPO sector, where Meena and Krishnan set up Customer Asset in 2000 with an investment of around Rs 5 lakh. The company was acquired by ICICI OneSource (now FirstSource) in 2002 for Rs 87 crore and is now listed as FirstSource Solutions. Meena was the company COO and helped grow it to almost 4,000 employees.

Continuing with business solutions, Ganesh founded Marketics, a data analytics firm, in 2003. The company was bought out by New Jersey-based WNS, an NYSE-listed company, for Rs 278 crore in 2007.

The couple’s most recent venture, prior to Portea Medical, was in the education space. In 2005, with Rs 50 lakh, they founded TutorVista, an online tutoring platform that depends on a variety of technological solutions to reach out to students across the world. Global education services leader Pearson eventually acquired the company for Rs 960 crore in 2011.

The couple’s total exit valuations till date are approximately are $300 million, according to Ganesh.

Since the entrepreneurial bug wasn’t leaving the couple any time soon, they began exploring other sectors where they could leave their mark. A non-compete clause with Pearson meant that education wasn’t an option anymore.

The driving force behind all of the duo’s endeavours has been technology. “We are tech people and use technology to fix daily problems,” Ganesh explained.

With that in mind, and a dislike for high capital intensive businesses, the couple approached the healthcare sector.

In a 2013 report, Bain & Co estimated India’s healthcare market to be approximately $78 billion worth with a growth rate of 11 percent from 2008 to 2012.India Brand Equity Foundation, part of the Ministry of Commerce, suggests that the already high growth rate for the healthcare sector is expected to accelerate to 20 percent, meaning that the market will be worth $280 billion by 2020.

Apart from their own research, which showed a gaping hole in India’s primary health care services, the Ganeshs have a personal experience that made them want to establish home healthcare services that provided a variety of treatments.

In 2010, Meena lost her father to cancer, and while taking care of him the duo saw him struggle with multiple hospital visits that were only a few minutes in duration, but would take over two or three hours when travel times were factored in.

The couple set up HealthVista in June 2013 and, as their first initiative, acquired (for equity) a one-year-old startup called Portea Medical, founded by Zachary Jones and Karan Aneja in Delhi, and continued the new venture under the Portea brand in Bangalore.

“The acquisition gave us a one-year headstart since they had already been testing pilot programmes with hospitals,” said Ganesh, “And then we started building the technology platform about six months ago.”

The single, integrated platform uses a combination of systems like GPS, cloud computing and Bluetooth to take care of all aspects of patient care. After installing the software on their smartphones and tablets, clinicians use thePorteaapp to access the patient’s medical history, and check specific instructions from the consulting specialists. Real-time updates of patient vitals are provided to thePorteapatient health record (PHR), via the device.

There is also a feature that issues alerts in case patients’ vitals cross set thresholds. Checks are also conducted for adverse drug reactions for any new drugs prescribed against the patients’ existing drug prescription.In the future, medical equipment will be embedded with Bluetooth capabilities so measurements like BP, temperature and blood sugar can automatically be updated in thePorteaapp.

The services provided include physiotherapy, nursing, primary in-house healthcare, oncology, palliative care, senior-care and NRI-tailored packages and home hospitalisation, with visits from doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, nutritionists, counsellors, and trained attendants.

Hospitals can tie up with Portea so that doctors and specialists can stay updated, real-time, with the progress of their patients once discharged - and are in the loop when a patient comes in for a check-up.

“We don’t do emergency care and we don’t have specialists,” Ganesh said, describing the staff of trained GPs, nurses and other healthcare practitioners. With a focus on the “middle market”, the pricing has been kept affordable, though it varies from city to city. A doctor’s visit costs Rs 700, a nurse visit is Rs 350 (or Rs 15,000/month for 12 hour shifts) and physiotherapy sessions are priced at Rs 400 per session.

Portea has two models now - pay per visit and an annual package. The annual elder care plan for Rs 9,999 includes general health check atthe start, doctor visits every month, nurse visits every fortnight to measure vitals. Lipidprofile, ECG, sugar and other vitals are checked every three months and a nursing attendantaccompanies the patient on hospital visits as and when needed.

Services are currently available in Delhi/NCR, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and PunewithJaipur, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Coimbatore and Ahmedabadnext in line. “We’re looking at cities with populations of over one million,” Ganesh explained, adding that a large elderly population is also a factor considered.

Khysar Jabeen, a Bangalore resident, has been a Portea Medical client for about 2 months, using its general check up services for her 85-year-old father, who has suffered from a stroke. Excessively long waits at the hospital added to Jabeen’s worries.

“Wewantedto find a doctor for home visits and tried everything possible, including using services like Just Dial, but nothing worked” she said. “After almost 30 months of struggle , I cameacross a Portea Medical ad on Facebook and grabbed the opportunity right away.” Acording to Jabeen the service comes in handy during emergency moments.

Growth has been good for Portea Medical, with 500 visits in November swelling to about 3,000 in January this year, and approximately 100 registrations per day. The widening popularity of mobiles and smartphones in urban areas, increasing broadband penetration and the rising computing capacity of phones have also helped.

The company recently securedRs48 crore in Series A funding from venture capital firms Accel Partners and Ventureast (which Ganesh credits to his and Meena’s stellar track record as entrepreneurs) and is looking to raise another Rs 200 crore or so to expand further.

“Home-based healthcare in India remains a largely unorganised whitespace today with a few service local providers who deliver services at a local to hyper-local level,” said Mahendran Balachandran of Accel Partners, adding,“With a proven founding team that hassuccessfully built large technology companies, Portea will be able to leverage internet and mobile technologies to truly revolutionise the way healthcare is currently administered in India.”

Portea Medical is considering renting out medical equipment, and introducing home-based chemotherapy and dialysis machines within the next year. To meet its rapid expansion demands, the company is going to hire close to 2,000 people in the next 12 months.

“There is huge demand in the ageing industry,” Ganesh said. “After all, growing old isn’t optional and we’re all going to need these services at some point of time in our lives.”