Apollo sets up Asia's first health city in Hyderabad

Tuesday, 12 June 2007, 19:30 IST
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Hyderabad: Apollo Hospitals Group, one of Asia's largest healthcare groups, Tuesday launched Apollo Health City, the first functional health city in Asia. Going beyond the realm of curative care it offers, the health city is an integrated facility offering solutions across the healthcare space including preventive care, holistic medicine, research, information technology and education. Spread over 33 acres at Apollo Hospital in Jubilee Hills here, the health city encompasses a 300-bedded multi-speciality hospital with over 50 specialties and super specialties along with 10 centres of excellence. Centres of excellence for heart diseases, cancer, orthopaedics and joint diseases, emergency, renal diseases, neurosciences, eye, minimally invasive surgery, trauma and cosmetic surgery are coming up in the integrated facility. The Apollo Group plans to apply for a special economic zone (SEZ) status to the health city. "It is not a medical city where you treat only the illness. The Apollo Health City takes care of totality of wellness," Prathap C. Reddy, chairman, Apollo Hospitals Group, told IANS hours before the formal launch of the city. He said 10 billion were already spent in creating the existing infrastructure for the health city while another 1.5-2.5 billion would be invested in setting up research institutes over the next six months. "Once Britain dominated the healthcare space, then US and now India is emerging as the global healthcare destination and Hyderabad with the Apollo Health City will lead the way for that," he said. He pointed out that research and technology had always been the thrust of Apollo. Apollo Health City has a variety of initiatives including medical BPO services for offshore customers (health street), online education for medical professionals (Medvarsity) and telemedicine services. The health city has already tied up with Tata Consultancy Service (TCS) for hospital information system. The system connects all Apollo Hospitals and 100 telemedicine centres in India and in Dubai, Kuwait, Doha, Nigeria, Dhaka and Sri Lanka. "We plan to connect 52 African countries through telemedicine," he said. Reddy said Apollo Group was focussing on research in key areas like cardiology, oncology, diabetes and neuro sciences. Apollo has joined hands with Johns Hopkins Medicine International, US, to undertake a collaborative study on cardiovascular diseases in India. "We want to find out why Asians are more prone to heart diseases," he said. He said Apollo created many benchmarks since its inception. "We have performed more than 59,000 heart surgeries with a success rate of 99.6 percent," he said. Apollo Health City is equipped to create a global talent pool of medical professionals. It will have institutes of PG education for doctors, nursing school and college, hospital administration, medical informatics, emergency medicine and paramedics. The focus at the health city will be on holistic health and facility will offer alternative forms of medicine, the benefits of which have been demonstrated across the world. One of Asia's largest healthcare groups, Apollo runs 41 hospitals in India and abroad. It has an annual turnover of 6 billion.
Source: IANS