ACT Grants Initiative
4 min readSep 22, 2020

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“The first conversation started with the Delhi government who reasoned whether the asymptomatic patients with mild COVID symptoms be sent to hospitals or rather be left at their homes for treatment. We proposed to them that the latter idea would be beneficial for both the healthcare ecosystem and the concerned families,” says Meena Ganesh, Co-founder and Managing Director of Portea Medical. Portea came up with a technology enabled, remote patient health monitoring & management system. In close coordination with the local government, they provide a fully at-home process-patient condition assessment led by a healthcare professional, regular symptom monitor and education, teleconsultation and daily on-call monitoring. “We repurposed our technology to make it suitable for managing the COVID patients remotely. This required constant monitoring of these patients by getting them in direct contact of doctor teleconsultants at the right time”. In the initial phase of this initiative, the Portea team also helped the Delhi government in developing the screening method for deciding the protocol as to which patients could be home isolated and which were not fit for the same.

Established in 2013, Portea Medical serves about 1,50,000 homes every month across 16 locations in India with its staff of more than 4,000 people

Another player, which has been helping to ease some pressure off the existing healthcare facility of the country is HealthCare at HOME (HCAH), a home healthcare service provider which is backed by the Burman family, the promoters of Dabur. After the onset of COVID19, they pivoted their model and started providing remote monitoring services to infected home isolated people. Vishesh Madaan, Manager-Business at HCAH explains, “we signed a tender deal with the Delhi government, and thereafter based on the list provided by the officials, we began providing monitoring services to the remote patients. This included a range of training and counselling services that included but were not limited to: teaching the application of tools for therapy, techniques for managing the disease at home, considerations for self-isolation, personalized diet chart of 10 days and constant monitoring support for the following 10 days”.

HCAH serving their patients at the most critical times
HCAH serving their patients at the most critical times

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ACT Grants Initiative

We are backing ideas that are capital efficient, scale ready and can create immediate impact to combat Covid-19.