Portea Medical has announced that it has been awarded the ‘Mark of Sustained Quality’ by the Quality and Accreditation Institute (QAI) for a period of 3 years starting November 2019. With this, Portea Medical 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 standardization norms and providing accreditation to organizations in the domain. This 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 about this, 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 disorganized with no control over quality or actual registrations and qualifications of people. The QAI accreditation is thus very important for players doing actual work in this sector to be recognized for their standardized services and will 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 standardization 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 standardization and regulation. We at QAI have created one of the first standardization modules for home healthcare. Accredited home Healthcare is one of the key 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 recognize similar organizations 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 organization accredits home healthcare organizations by evaluating them on 69 standards and 278 parameters, spread across 9 chapters.