Thursday, May 21, 2015

BUSINESS SPECIAL ..................Doctor in the House

Doctor in the House


How Medwell is turning home healthcare into a professionally run service

One of the sure signs of economic development is the movement of un organised services to the organised sector, be it retail, restaurants, taxis or gyms.Once delivered by small, local outfits, these services are increasingly going over to corporates who have the resources required to build them up to scale and give them that sheen of professionalism that Indians have now come to expect from service providers. The latest to join this trend is homecare services ­ the nurses, physiotherapists and doctors who take over after patients have been discharged from hospital. “Home care is a $100 billion market in the USA and a $25 billion market in Japan and it has huge potential in India,“ says Vishal Bali, chairman of Medwell Ventures, a company he has co-founded to incubate startups in the field of medicine.
Medwell's first venture is Nightingales Home Health Services, a company it acquired last year from its founder Dr Radha Murthy.Nightingales is an 18 year old company, with over 5,000 families in Bangalore subscribing to its annual home care plans, so it isn't exactly a startup. But over the next five years, Medwell plans to pump in $50 million into the company and take it panIndia. Nighingales is not the only company with big plans in this field.Portea Medical, a company led by serial entrepreneur couple K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh, also operates in the home care market, bringing in a healthy dose of competition.
Medwell has already added 2,000 subscribers and expanded Nightingale's coverage in Bangalore, setting up two new centres in Indira Nagar and RT Nagar that act as operating hubs for these areas. It has bought a fleet of 18 new cars ­ six Tata Nanos and 12 Maruti Eecos, eye-catchingly painted with the Nightingale logo ­ to ferry its staff between the centres and patient's homes.And it is now leveraging Bangalore's tech expertise to create a cloud based IT infrastructure.
Nightingale's nurses are equipped with tablet PCs that record the patient's recovery at home, for presentation to his or her hospital doctor. “Home care may seem deceptively simple, but building the operation to scale is anything but,“ says co-founder and CEO Lalit Pai.“Technology and data are going to be very important for the future of medicine in India. Insurance companies need detailed records to settle claims. Keeping patient's medical records in the cloud is a key feature of our operation.“
One of Medwell's earliest patients was an executive of Lenovo's Bangalore office, who suffered a stroke at the age of 35. He required home care services of a nurse, a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist and a speech therapist and the process to full recovery was a long one and continued even after he rejoined work. At `14,000 a month, care of this kind doesn't come cheap, but in a city where time is money, Medwell's joint chairman and co-founder Ferzaan Engineer believes it's an idea whose time has come.“People are now used to the idea of paying for better healthcare,“ he says.“We're not for the bottom of the pyramid, though we don't want it to be perceived as too expensive in this early stage when we are creating a new category. Our strategy is to start with the middle income segment and then move to the higher and lower ends of the market.“
Besides being old friends, the founding trio are former veterans of the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors and they've been unabashedly using their corporate contacts to rope in talent for their first entrepreneurial venture. “The pharma sector has a lot of talent to give,“ says Engineer, who was the CEO of Quintiles Research India, a pioneer in clinical research outsourcing. “More than the healthcare industry, it is the pharma industry which understands what we are trying to do here at Medwell.“
Vishal Bali was previously the CEO of Wockhardt Hospitals and then Fortis Healthcare and he's happily raided the Fortis hospital chain to recruit 350 nurses, physiotherapists and doctors for Medwell.“Nurses are now more aware of home care as a career option and it's attracting some of the best talent,“ he says.“A lot of qualified nurses don't want to work in hospitals because it involves working in shifts. And we've made sure that our qualified nurses all have assistants who do bed-side care like bathing the patient, so their time is optimally utilised.“
One of the senior executives to join Medwell from Fortis Healthcare is the cheery Mohammed Parveez Jameel, who is designated group head, business development and strategy. He says: “I never dreamed I would work in a company that provides home care services.Hospitals never thought of it as something that could be organised and run by professionals.Even now, I sometimes feel amazed at what we are doing, taking this operation pan-India.“
Medwell has recently opened its first centre outside of Bangalore, in Begumpet, Hyderabad, and the next city on its strategic map is Mumbai. Nightingales operates on a subscription system, charging an annual fee of `1,000 a year for the first person in a family to subscribe and Rs 750 for every additional member. Its marketing department is now approaching Bangalore's builders to offer home care packages to entire housing complexes. In the next five years, it has set itself a target of one million subscribers, and CEO Lalit Pai says: “The demand side doesn't worry us.It's the supply side we need to be concerned with. As supply gets going, demand will unlock itself.“
Five kilometers from Medwell's headquarters on MG Road, at the Nightingales centre in the upmarket residential suburb of Indiranagar, the tenor of the conversation changes. The doctors and nurses here are not too concerned about their company's revenue targets and Pai is happy to keep it that way. “We don't want to bother them with business plans. Their focus is on patient care,“ he says. The centre focuses on people affected with stroke, dementia, dia betes, cancer, lung and cardio-vascular disease, which require home care by their very nature. For those with acute diabetes, for example, Nightingales provides wound-care services, which involves specialised dressings. Here it has tied-up with ConvaTec, a European medical supplies company, for supply of high end dressings at a reduced rate, a prerogative of corporates that have scale.
Dementia care is a burgeoning field in which Nightingales is building expertise. Though it is incurable, the effects of dementia can be mitigated with specialised care that involves getting the patient to participate in activities that focus their attention. The Indiranagar centre currently has 20 patients with late stage dementia in its care and Pai says demand for this service is much higher than the company's capacity to supply. “We found it difficult to get trained people for dementia care, so we've started our own training program. Dementia patients gener ally require 24 hour care, so it has the potential to become a high revenue business.“
One of Nighingale's more interesting innovations in the recent past is its foray into dental care.The Indiranagar Centre has a portable dentist's chair that is transported to the homes of elderly patients, and the story goes that the idea came from an elderly lady, a retired school teacher, who had suffered a stroke and whose dentures no longer fitted as a result.“She was very conscious of her appearance and wanted us to fix this so she could continue to receive her friends at home,“ says Pai. Today, home dental care for the elderly is one of Nightingale's fastest growing businesses.
By Dibeyendu Ganguly
CDET15MAY15


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