Nightingales Home Health to offer at-home dialysis to Indian patients

Bengaluru: Nightingales Home Health Services, part of Medwell Ventures Pvt. Ltd, has tied up with global kidney-care specialist DaVita Healthcare Partners Inc. to provide dialysis for patients in the comfort of their homes.

Dialysis is a cumbersome procedure of purifying blood done on patients suffering from acute kidney failure. It is mostly performed at hospitals and typically lasts at least half a day. An estimated 1 million patients need dialysis three times a week. in India.

DaVita, which will provide medical equipment to Nightingale in the tie-up, has over 2,100 dialysis centres in the US and 93 such centres in 10 other countries. The tie-up in India will be for pre- and-post dialysis care and home hemodialysis, a type of dialysis done for end-stage renal disease.

“Dialysis can be a daunting task for patients. By proving dialysis care at home, we look to tap a number of patients who undergo hemodialysis. Bengaluru alone has around 4,000 such patients of which only less than 100 undergo it at home,” said Lalit Pai, chief executive of Nightingales Home Health Services.

While DaVita will provide the equipment and facilities to monitor patients online, Nightingales will be in charge of the nursing part, Pai said, without disclosing details of the revenue-sharing agreement.

Using these services at home could prove to be expensive. Nephroplus, a pure play dialysis care venture backed by International Finance Corporation and Bessemer Venture Partners, charges ₹ 1300- ₹ 1800 for each session of dialysis, and double that amount when it is done at home.

“To provide dialysis at home, one has to bear costs of the dialysis units, reverse osmosis plant and the staff. The question here then is about dedicated versus shared resources. In a ten-bedded care centre, the costs would obviously come down because the focus is not on one patient. We offer home services only to around 25 of our 3600 patients, as not many can afford it,” said Vikram Vuppula, founder and chief executive of Nephroplus.

At Nightingales, a patient would have to make a refundable deposit of ₹ 1 lakh for a portable dialysis machine to be kept at home followed by ₹ 7,500 for each dialysis session.

Last month, Fidelity Growth Partners India and Fidelity Biosciences had invested $10 million to pick up a minority stake in Nightingales. The company plans to use that money to expand from its current locations of Bengaluru and Hyderabad to half-a-dozen new cities in three years.