Here's how IIT and ISB alumnus is bringing ICUs and cancer care to patients' homes

What if you could get the healthcare you need at home? Not just dental services and post-operative care, but more intensive treatment. It's now a possibility, thanks to a healthcare venture that's backed by the promoter of Dabur India, and delivers even ICU and chemotherapy services at a patient's home.

HealthCare atHOME (HCAH) is a Noida-based startup that delivers healthcare services, including ICU, step-down beds, post-operative care, nursing, physiotherapy, attendant services, and elderly care.

After seeing Healthcare at Home UK, IIT-ISB graduate Vivek Srivastava realised that India, too, was in great need of a similar concept. In 2012, he founded HCAH along with Gareth Jones, Chairman of Dabur India Anand Burman; Gaurav Burman, Director of Dabur International; and Charles Walsh, Founder of Healthcare at Home UK.

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The company has a proprietary technology platform for patient management, tracking, and e-monitoring.

"Since the first day of operations, HCAH has been a paperless organisation," says the founder.

Convenient, comfortable clinical services

HCAH offers clinical services and integrated pharma business. Under its clinical service business, HCAH provides hospital-like services at home.

"Think of us as a distributed hospital. As per a study, 70 percent of what can happen in a hospital can be done at home and we do exactly that," Vivek says.

The company provides personalised and protocol-led care by trained professionals, guided by care plan prescribed by doctors. It also shares progress reports of a patient with the doctor and the family at a frequency of their choice. This gives the doctor an opportunity to intervene at any point of time and have complete control over the patient's care.

For the clinical services, HCAH charges patients on service delivery, much like how hospitals do.

"Globally, homecare is about 3 to 6 percent of the healthcare market and is funded by insurance because it is proven to be 20 percent cheaper than the hospital. Hence, we work not only with out-of-pocket customers, but also with insurance as a player," Vivek says.

While HCAH does not own their own vehicles, they have teams and associated organisations to help with clinical set-up at patients' homes. HCAH also has doorstep delivery services for medicines across India, for which they have tied up with Japanese healthcare company M3 Inc.

Inside the integrated pharma business

In its integrated pharma business, HCAH basically works with pharma companies on a B2B model to increase prescriptions by creating awareness of diseases, screening, and diagnostics. It also works to prevent patient dropouts post prescription through on-boarding, clinical service delivery, pharmacy delivery, and maintaining compliance.

"We are responsible for awareness, screening, diagnostic, on-boarding of patients on therapy, disease management, and compliance," Vivek adds.

HCAH works with top pharma companies in the country, including four out of the top five global companies.

It provides clinical and integrated pharma services in more than 70 cities across India. These include Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, Jaipur, Imphal, Lucknow, Mangalore, Srinagar, Surat, Trivandrum, Raipur, Patna, and some cities in Punjab.

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Experienced team

Vivek, an IIT-Delhi alumnus, was an investment banker. He started Nova IVI Fertility before joining the family office for Burman family, where he conducted six investments, including in Berkeley Health Edu.

HCAH has a highly experienced management team including, Gaurav Thukral, former COO of Fortis Health Care, and Jayant Singh, who has worked with top global pharma companies.

Gagan Kapoor, the chief physiotherapist, was earlier the team head physiotherapist of the Indian National Football Team and the lead physiotherapist for the North East United Football Club. Punita Singh, former Director Nursing at Apollo Hospitals, is Director Nursing at HCAH.

Growth and market

"Our revenue has grown up to 100x since inception and the number of employees has grown by 150 times," Vivek says.

He claims that the company has so far served more than four lakh patients across the country.

According to a FICCI KPMG report, the Indian healthcare space is expected to grow at 23 percent CAGR to a $80 billion market by 2020.

Players like aggregator platform Zoctr, oral healthcare startup Vatsalya, and local health aggregator Zozz provide healthcare services at home. However, what sets HCAH apart is the team and certifications.

It is the first Indian home healthcare company to be QAI Accredited for home healthcare accreditation standards, claims the founder. "We are also ISO 27001 certified," Vivek says.

The mix of professionals from business and medical backgrounds is another advantage HCAH has over its competitors. The company maintains quality of clinical delivery through an audit process, which includes onsite, telephonic, and video-based audits.

Future plans

HCAH's goal is to reach all cities in the country to provide their clinical services. In its integrated pharma services business, the company wants to increase its depth.

"We want to become the largest homecare company in the country, a Rs 1,000 crore company, and scale to 1,500 employees by 2020," Vivek says.

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