South Indian City Gets Asia’s First Health City

South Indian city gets Asia’s first health city

NEW DELHI, June 12 (Xinhua) — Apollo Hospitals Group, one of Asia’s largest healthcare groups, Tuesday launched Apollo Health City in south Indian city Hyderabad, the first functional health city in Asia, Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) reported here.

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.

The health city encompasses a 300-bedded multi-speciality hospital with over 50 specialties and super specialties along with 10 centers of excellence.

Centers 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.

He said 250 million US dollars were already spent in creating the existing infrastructure for the health city. Another big amount is likely to be spent.”Once Britain dominated the healthcare space, then United States (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.

The health city has already tied up with software firm Tata Consultancy Service (TCS) for hospital information system. The system connects all Apollo Hospitals and 100 telemedicine centers 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 focusing 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.

One of Asia’s largest healthcare groups, Apollo runs 41 hospitals in India and abroad. It has an annual turnover of 150 million US dollars.

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