Portea Medical forays into elder care

Consumer healthcare brand and provider of home healthcare services Portea Medical has forayed into the elder-care segment with its new offering – Portea Health Prime, a customised offering for seniors.

In a statement released on Monday, the company said that the latest offering is an exclusive healthcare service for people above 65 years of age and is designed to address the comprehensive health monitoring needs of elders.

“The population of seniors in the country is growing rapidly and many of them have one or more chronic conditions. This combined by the fact that most of them live on their own, and not with extended families, makes their healthcare management a rapidly growing challenge,” the company said in a statement.

A membership into Portea Health Prime will include a specific doctor assigned to every family that has signed up who will constantly monitor the health need of the elders. “The doctor would carry out a comprehensive assessment and create a customised plan for the couple,” the company said.

The plan will also include a health manager – a single point of contact assigned to each family who will ensure that a customised healthcare plan is delivered and implemented.

Portea said the membership will also include additional benefits such as access to Portea’s hospital partners, a tailor-made social calendar for seniors and the company’s exclusive Care Club.

Speaking exclusively to Fortune India, Meena Ganesh, MD and CEO of Portea Medical, said the service is targeting families wherein the children are either settled abroad or in cities away from their parents.

“The natural care system for the elders of the family, which was the children and the extended family, is not available anymore in a lot of cases. Children move away for their careers and the extended family too lives far away. Despite getting older, the elders continue to have a desire for an independent life,” she said, adding that the option of a retirement community for seniors is not viewed favourably in Indian society yet.

“So we thought a new solution has to emerge; what we call “aging at home”. But it requires a lot of things to fall in place,” she went on, further saying that with Portea’s latest offering, elders can now continue to enjoy a good quality of life while living in their own home.

Ganesh also said that Portea’s latest offering will tie-up with NGOs and event agencies, to create workshops and events for the enrolled members, to enable growing elder communities in key cities.

When asked about the pricing of the latest service, Ganesh said it has always been Portea’s endeavor to keep the prices in the middle range as that makes it more accessible.

Apart from elder-care, Ganesh said Portea is also focusing on specialised home care in the post-operative space, cancer care and critical care at home.