Portea becomes first home healthcare brand to receive ‘Mark of Sustained Quality’ for its services

Portea Medical has been awarded the ‘Mark of Sustained Quality’ by the Quality and Accreditation Institute (QAI) for a period of three years starting November 2019. With this, the company becomes the first home healthcare company to receive the accreditation for multiple cities including Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai.

QAI is the gold standard for home healthcare and will help in setting standardisation norms and providing accreditation to organisations in the domain. It will enable home healthcare solutions to be covered by health insurance and make it more affordable for the masses. QAI designed these standards with support of a technical committee comprising health industry leaders and stalwarts of home healthcare in India including Portea Medical.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Vishal Sehgal, Medical Director, Portea Medical, said, “Home healthcare is integral in the Indian context due to many reasons. Hospital beds are always at a premium and it’s better for recovery to happen at home rather than in a hospital. Until recently, this sector was largely disorganised with no control over quality or actual registrations and qualifications of people. The QAI accreditation is thus important for players doing actual work in this sector to be recognised for their standardised services and help bring in more regulation. We are happy to have received the ‘Mark of Sustained Quality’. The QAI standards are a much-needed step towards standardisation of home healthcare and a welcome move for the industry.”

Adding further, Dr BK Rana, Founding CEO, QAI, said, “Access to affordable and quality healthcare – including that within the home setup — is the need of the hour in India. This can only be ensured when there is standardisation and regulation. We, at QAI, have created one of the first standardisation modules for home healthcare. Accredited home Healthcare is one of the keys to achieve Universal Health Coverage. Portea Medical is not only a leader in this domain across many Indian cities, but is also pioneering innovations. Their processes adhere to the highest quality standards and therefore, we are happy to accredit them with the ‘Mark of Sustained Quality’. QAI will continue to recognise similar organisations going forward as well.”

The QAI standards rely on measurable criteria to ensure proper governance, competent human resources, adequate facility, appropriate information management, quality improvement opportunities and safe practices. The organisation accredits home healthcare organisations by evaluating them on 69 standards and 278 parameters, spread across nine chapters.

Portea provides comprehensive healthcare solutions outside of hospitals. The company covers everything from lab services, pharma delivery, and equipment/devices rentals and sales to medical manpower deployment at the patients’ home. Since inception, Portea has completed more than 3.5 million patient visits across 16 cities in India including Bengaluru, NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Jaipur, and Indore. The company manages over 150,000 patient visits each month and works with more than 70 leading hospital partners, 15 pharma majors and leading insurance companies in India.

It is currently the largest home healthcare company in India and with over six years of experience in the domain. The brand aims to deliver quality care and take world-class medical assistance to patients’ home, thereby making primary healthcare more accessible and affordable to one and all.